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THE OLD FRONT LINE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
TORONTO 



THE 
OLD FRONT LINE 



BY 



JOHN MASEFIELD 

Author of "Gallipoli," etc. 



&*ro fork 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 

All rights reserved 



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Copyright, 1917 
By JOHN MASEFIELD 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, December, 1917. 



DEC 14 1917 

©CI.A479516 ■ ^ 



TO 
NEVILLE LYTTON 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



The Road up the Ancre Valley 16 

Artillery Transport in Bapaume Road ... 28 

Troops Moving to the Front 38 

An Artillery Team 40 

View in Hamel , . . 42 

The Ancre River 44 

The Ancre Opposite Hamel 48 

The Leipzig Salient 58 

Dugouts in La Boisselle ....... 66 

La Boisselle 70 

Fricourt 74 

Fricourt 76 

Sandbags at Fricourt 78 

Mametz 82 

Sleighs for the Wounded . 88 

The Attack on La Boisselle 94 



THE OLD FRONT LINE 

This description of the old front line, as it was 
when the Battle of the Somme began, may some 
day be of use. All wars end ; even this war will 
some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and 
the field full of death will grow food, and all 
this frontier of trouble will be forgotten. 
When the trenches are filled in, and the plough 
has gone over them, the ground will not long 
keep the look of war. One summer with its 
flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can 
make, and then these places, from which the 
driving back of the enemy began, will be hard 
indeed to trace, even with maps. It is said that 
even now in some places the wire has been re- 
moved, the explosive salved, the trenches filled, 
and the ground ploughed with tractors. In a 
few years' time, when this war is a romance in 
memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield 
will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel 
Trench, Munster Alley, and these other paths 
to glory will be deep under the corn, and glean- 
ers will sing at Dead Mule Corner. 

9 



10 The Old Front Line 

It is hoped that this description of the line 
will be followed by an account of our people's 
share in the battle. The old front line was the 
base from which the battle proceeded. It was 
the starting-place. The thing began there. It 
was the biggest battle in which our people were 
ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger 
results than any battle of this war since the Bat- 
tle of the Marne. It caused a great falling 
back of the enemy armies. It freed a great 
tract of France, seventy miles long, by from ten 
to twenty-five miles broad. It first gave the 
enemy the knowledge that he was beaten. 

Very many of our people never lived to know 
the result of even the first day's fighting. For 
then the old front line was the battlefield, and 
the No Man's Land the prize of the battle. 
They never heard the cheer of victory nor 
looked into an enemy trench. Some among 
them never even saw the No Man's Land, but 
died in the summer morning from some shell in 
the trench in the old front line here described. 

It is a difficult thing to describe without 
monotony, for it varies so little. It is like de- 
scribing the course of the Thames from Oxford 
to Reading, or of the Severn from Deerhurst 
to Lydney, or of the Hudson from New York 



The Old Front Line n 

to Tarrytown. Whatever country the rivers 
pass they remain water, bordered by shore. So 
our front-line trenches, wherever they lie, are 
only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside 
a greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell- 
holes, which is fenced with thicker, blacker, but 
more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind 
this further wire is the parapet of the enemy 
front-line trench, which swerves to take in a 
hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope, 
but remains roughly parallel with ours, from 
seventy to five hundred yards from it, for miles 
and miles, up hill and down dale. All the ad- 
vantages of position and observation were in 
the enemy's hands, not in ours. They took up 
their lines when they were strong and our side 
weak, and in no place in all the old Somme posi- 
tion is our line better sited than theirs, though 
in one or two places the sites are nearly equal. 
Almost in every part of this old front our men 
had to go up hill to attack. 

If the description of this old line be dull to 
read, it should be remembered that it was dull 
to hold. The enemy had the lookout posts, 
with the fine views over France, and the sense 
of domination. Our men were down below 
with no view of anything but of stronghold after 
stronghold, just up above, being made stronger 



12 The Old Front Line 

daily. And if the enemy had strength of posi- 
tion he had also strength of equipment, of men, 
of guns, and explosives of all kinds. He had 
all the advantages for nearly two years of war, 
and in all that time our old front line, whether 
held by the French or by ourselves, was nothing 
but a post to be endured, day in day out, in all 
weathers and under all fires, in doubt, difficulty, 
and danger, with bluff and makeshift and im- 
provisation, till the tide could be turned. If it 
be dull to read about and to see, it was, at least, 
the old line which kept back the tide and stood 
the siege. It was the line from which, after all 
those months of war, the tide turned and the be- 
sieged became the attackers. 

To most of the British soldiers who took part 
in the Battle of the Somme, the town of Albert 
must be a central point in a reckoning of dist- 
ances. It lies, roughly speaking, behind the 
middle of the line of that battle. It is a knot of 
roads, so that supports and supplies could and 
did move from it to all parts of the line during 
the battle. It is on the main road, and on the 
direct railway line from Amiens. It is by much 
the most important town within an easy march 
of the battlefield. It will be, quite certainly, the 
centre from which, in time to come," travellers 



The Old Front Line 13 

will start to see the battlefield where such deeds 
were done by men of our race. 

It is not now (after three years of war and 
many bombardments) an attractive town; prob- 
ably it never was. It is a small straggling town 
built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at 
a point where the swift chalk-river Ancre, 
hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so 
channeled that it can be used for power. Be- 
fore the war it contained a few small factories, 
including one for the making of sewing-ma- 
chines. Its most important building was a big 
church built a few years ago, through the energy 
of a priest, as a shrine for the Virgin of Albert, 
a small, probably not very old image, about 
which strange stories are told. Before the war 
it was thought that this church would become a 
northern rival to Lourdes for the working of 
miraculous cures during the September pilgrim- 
age. A gilded statue of the Virgin and Child 
stood on an iron stalk on the summit of the 
church tower. During a bombardment of the 
town at a little after three o'clock in the after- 
noon of Friday, January 15, 19 15, a shell so 
bent the stalk that the statue bent down over 
the Place as though diving. Perhaps few of 
our soldiers will remember Albert for anything 
except this diving Virgin. Perhaps half of the 



14 The Old Front Line 

men engaged in the Battle of the Somme passed 
underneath her as they marched up to the line, 
and, glancing up, hoped that she might not come 
down till they were past. From some one, 
French or English, a word has gone about that 
when she does fall the war will end. Others 
have said that French engineers have so fixed 
her with wire ropes that she cannot fall. 

From Albert four roads lead to the battlefield 
of the Somme : 

i. In a north-westerly direction to Auchon- 
villers and Hebuterne. 

2. In a northerly direction to Authuille and 
Hamel. 

3. In a north-easterly direction to Pozieres. 

4. In an easterly direction to Fricourt and 
Maricourt. 

Between the second and the third of these the 
little river Ancre runs down its broad, flat, well- 
wooded valley, much of which is a marsh 
through which the river (and man) have forced 
more than one channel. This river, which is a 
swift, clear, chalk stream, sometimes too deep 
and swift to ford, cuts the English sector of the 
battlefield into two nearly equal portions. 

Following the first of the four roads, one 
passes the wooded village of Martinsart, to the 



The Old Front Line 15 

village of Auchonvillers, which lies among a 
clump of trees upon a ridge or plateau top. 
The road dips here, but soon rises again, and 
so, by a flat tableland, to the large village of 
Hebuterne. Most of this road, with the ex- 
ception of one little stretch near Auchonvillers, 
is hidden by high ground from every part of the 
battlefield. Men moving upon it cannot see the 
field. 

Hebuterne, although close to the line and 
shelled daily and nightly for more than two 
years, was never the object of an attack in force, 
so that much of it remains. Many of its walls 
and parts of some of its roofs still stand, the 
church tower is in fair order, and no one walk- 
ing in the streets can doubt that he is in a village. 
Before the war it was a prosperous village; then, 
for more than two years, it rang with the roar 
of battle and with the business of an army. 
Presently the tide of the war ebbed away from 
it and left it deserted, so that one may walk in 
it now, from end to end, without seeing a human 
being. It is as though the place had been smit- 
ten by the plague. Villages during the Black 
Death must have looked thus. One walks in 
the village expecting at every turn to meet a 
survivor, but there is none; the village is dead; 
the grass is growing in the street; the bells are 



1 6 The Old Front Line 

silent; the beasts are gone from the byre and the 
ghosts from the church. Stealing about among 
the ruins and the gardens are the cats of the 
village, who have eaten too much man to fear 
him, but are now too wild to come to him. 
They creep about and eye him from cover and 
look like evil spirits. 

The second of the four roads passes out of 
Albert, crosses the railway at a sharp turn, over 
a bridge called Marmont Bridge, and runs 
northward along the valley of the Ancre within 
sight of the railway. Just beyond the Mar- 
mont Bridge there is a sort of lake or reservoir 
or catchment of the Ancre overflows, a little to 
the right of the road. By looking across this 
lake as he walks northward, the traveller can 
see some rolls of gentle chalk hill, just beyond 
which the English front line ran at the beginning 
of the battle. 

A little further on, at the top of a rise, the 
road passes the village of Aveluy, where there 
is a bridge or causeway over the Ancre valley. 
Aveluy itself, being within a mile and a half 
of enemy gun positions for nearly two years 
of war, is knocked about, and rather roofless 
and windowless. A cross-road leading to the 
causeway across the valley once gave the place 
some little importance. 




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The Old Front Line 17 

Not far to the north of Aveluy, the road runs 
for more than a mile through the Wood of 
Aveluy, which is a well-grown plantation of 
trees and shrubs. This wood hides the marsh 
of the river from the traveller. Tracks from 
the road lead down to the marsh and across it 
by military causeways. 

On emerging from the wood, the road runs 
within hail of the railway, under a steep and 
high chalk bank partly copsed with scrub. 
Three-quarters of a mile from the wood it 
passes through the skeleton of the village of 
Hamel, which is now a few ruined walls of brick 
standing in orchards on a hillside. Just north 
of this village, crossing the road, the railway, 
and the river-valley, is the old English front 
line. 

The third of the four roads is one of the main 
roads of France. It is the state highway, laid 
on the line of a Roman road, from Albert to 
Bapaume. It is by far the most used and the 
most important of the roads crossing the battle- 
field. As it leads directly to Bapaume, which 
was one of the prizes of the victory, and points 
like a sword through the heart of the enemy 
positions it will stay in the memories of our 
soldiers as the main avenue of the battle. 

The road leaves Albert in a street of dingy 



1 8 The Old Front Line 

and rather broken red-brick houses. After 
passing a corner crucifix it shakes itself free of 
the houses and rises slowly up a ridge of chalk 
hill about three hundred feet high. On the left 
of the road, this ridge, which is much withered 
and trodden by troops and horses, is called Usna 
Hill. On the right, where the grass is green 
and the chalk of the old communication trenches 
still white and clean, it is called Tara Hill. 
Far away on the left, along the line of the Usna 
Hill, one can see the Aveluy Wood. 

Looking northward from the top of the 
Usna-Tara Hill to the dip below it and along 
the road for a few yards up the opposite slope, 
one sees where the old English front line crossed 
the road at right angles. The enemy front line 
faced it at a few yards' distance, just about two 
miles from Albert town. 

The fourth of the four roads runs for about a 
mile eastwards from Albert, and then slopes 
down into a kind of gully or shallow valley, 
through which a brook once ran and now drib- 
bles. The road crosses the brook-course, and 
runs parallel with it for a little while to a place 
where the ground on the left comes down in a 
slanting tongue and on the right rises steeply 
into a big hill. The ground of the tongue bears 
traces of human habitation on it, all much 



The Old Front Line 19 

smashed and discoloured. This is the once 
pretty village of Fricourt. The hill on the 
right front at this point is the Fricourt Salient. 
The lines run round the salient and the road 
cuts across them. 

Beyond Fricourt, the road leaves another 
slanting tongue at some distance to its left. On 
this second tongue the village of Mametz once 
stood. Near here the road, having now cut 
across the salient, again crosses both sets of 
lines, and begins a long, slow ascent to a ridge 
or crest. From this point, for a couple of miles, 
the road is planted on each side with well-grown 
plane-trees, in some of which magpies have built 
their nests ever since the war began. At the 
top of the rise the road runs along the plateau 
top (under trees which show more and more 
plainly the marks of war) to a village so planted 
that it seems to stand in a wood. The village 
is built of red brick, and is rather badly broken 
by enemy shell fire, though some of the houses in 
it are still habitable. This is the village of 
Maricourt. Three or four hundred yards be- 
yond Maricourt the road reaches the old Eng- 
lish front line, at the eastern extremity of the 
English sector, as it was at the beginning of the 
battle. 



20 The Old Front Line 

These four roads which lead to the centre and 
the wings of the battlefield were all, throughout 
the battle and for the months of war which pre- 
ceded it, dangerous by daylight. All could be 
shelled by the map, and all, even the first, which 
was by much the best hidden of the four, could 
be seen, in places, from the enemy position. 
On some of the trees or tree stumps by the sides 
of the roads one may still see the " camouflage " 
by which these exposed places were screened 
from the enemy observers. The four roads 
were not greatly used in the months of war 
which preceded the battle. In those months, 
the front was too near to them, and other lines 
of supply and approach were more direct and 
safer. But there was always some traffic upon 
them of men going into the line or coming out, 
of ration parties, munition and water carriers, 
and ambulances. On all four roads many men 
of our race were killed. All, at some time, or 
many times, rang and flashed with explosions. 
Danger, death, shocking escape and firm re- 
solve, went up and down those roads daily and 
nightly. Our men slept and ate and sweated 
and dug and died along them after all hardships 
and in all weathers. On parts of them, no traf- 
fic moved, even at night, so that the grass grew 
high upon them. Presently, they will be quiet 



The Old Front Line 21 

country roads again, and tourists will walk at 
ease, where brave men once ran and dodged 
and cursed their luck, when the Battle of the 
Somme was raging. 

Then, indeed, those roads were used. Then 
the grass that had grown on some of them was 
trodden and crushed under. The trees and 
banks by the waysides were used to hide batter- 
ies, which roared all day and all night. At all 
hours and in all weathers the convoys of horses 
slipped and stamped along those roads with 
more shells for the ever-greedy cannon. At 
night, from every part of those roads, one saw a 
twilight of summer lightning winking over the 
high ground from the never-ceasing flashes of 
guns and shells. Then there was no quiet, but 
a roaring, a crashing, and a screaming from 
guns, from shells bursting and from shells pass- 
ing in the air. Then, too, on the two roads to 
the east of the Ancre River, the troops for the 
battle moved up to the line. The battalions 
were played by their bands through Albert, and 
up the slope of Usna Hill to Pozieres and be- 
yond, or past Fricourt and the wreck of Mametz 
to Montauban and the bloody woodland near it. 
Those roads then were indeed paths of glory 
leading to the grave. 



22 The Old Front Line 

During the months which preceded the Battle 
of the Somme, other roads behind our front 
lines were more used than these. Little vil- 
lages, out of shell fire, some miles from the lines, 
were then of more use to us than Albert. Long 
after we are gone, perhaps, stray English tour- 
ists, wandering in Picardy, will see names 
scratched in a barn, some mark or notice on a 
door, some sign-post, some little line of graves, 
or hear, on the lips of a native, some slang 
phrase of English, learned long before in the 
wartime, in childhood, when the English were 
there. All the villages behind our front were 
thronged with our people. There they rested 
after being in the line and there they established 
their hospitals and magazines. It may be said, 
that men of our race died in our cause in every 
village within five miles of the front. Wher- 
ever the traveller comes upon a little company 
of our graves, he will know that he is near the 
site of some old hospital or clearing station, 
where our men were brought in from the line. 

So much for the roads by which our men 
marched to this battlefield. Near the lines they 
had to leave the roads for the shelter of some 
communication trench or deep cut in the mud, 
revetted at the sides with wire to hinder it from 



The Old Front Line 23 

collapsing inwards. By these deep narrow 
roads, only broad enough for marching in single 
file, our men passed to " the front," to the line 
itself. Here and there, in recesses in the 
trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered 
with sandbags, they passed the offices and the 
stores of war, telephonists, battalion headquar- 
ters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, 
lights, machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars, and 
cases. Many men, passing these things as they 
went " in " for the first time, felt with a sinking 
of the heart, that they were leaving all ordered 
and arranged things, perhaps forever, and that 
the men in charge of these stores enjoyed, by 
comparison, a life like a life at home. 

Much of the relief and munitioning of the 
fighting lines was done at night. Men going 
into the lines saw little of where they were go- 
ing. They entered the gash of the communica- 
tion trench, following the load on the back of 
the man in front, but seeing perhaps nothing 
but the shape in front, the black walls of the 
trench, and now and then some gleam of a star 
in the water under foot. Sometimes as they 
marched they would see the starshells, going up 
and bursting like rockets, and coming down 
with a wavering slow settling motion, as white 
and bright as burning magnesium wire, shedding 



24 The Old Front Line 

a kind of dust of light upon the trench and mak- 
ing the blackness intense when they went out. 
These lights, the glimmer in the sky from the 
enemy's guns, and now and then the flash of a 
shell, were the things seen by most of our men 
on their first going in. 

In the fire trench they saw little more than the 
parapet. If work were being done in the No 
Man's Land, they still saw little save by these 
lights that floated and fell from the enemy and 
from ourselves. They could see only an array 
of stakes tangled with wire, and something dis- 
tant and dark which might be similar stakes, or 
bushes, or men, in front of what could only be 
the enemy line. When the night passed, and 
those working outside the trench had to take 
shelter, they could see nothing, even at a loop- 
hole or periscope, but the greenish strip of 
ground, pitted with shell-holes and fenced with 
wire, running up to the enemy line. There was 
little else for them to see, looking to the front, 
for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. 

The soldiers who held this old front line of 
ours saw this grass and wire day after day, per- 
haps, for many months. It was the limit of 
their world, the horizon of their landscape, the 
boundary. What interest there was in their 
life was the speculation, what lay beyond that 



The Old Front Line 25 

wire, and what the enemy was doing there. 
They seldom saw an enemy. They heard his 
songs and they were stricken by his missiles, but 
seldom saw more than, perhaps, a swiftly mov- 
ing cap at a gap in the broken parapet, or a grey 
figure flitting from the light of a starshell. 
Aeroplanes brought back photographs of those 
unseen lines. Sometimes, in raids in the night, 
our men visited them and brought back prison- 
ers ; but they remained mysteries and unknown. 
In the early morning of the 1 st of July, 1 9 1 6, 
our men looked at them as they showed among 
the bursts of our shells. Those familiar heaps, 
the lines, were then in a smoke of dust full of 
flying clods and shards and gleams of fire. Our 
men felt that now, in a few minutes, they would 
see the enemy and know what lay beyond those 
parapets and probe the heart of that mystery. 
So, for the last half-hour, they watched and 
held themselves ready, while the screaming of 
the shells grew wilder and the roar of the bursts 
quickened into a drumming. Then as the time 
drew near, they looked a last look at that un- 
known country, now almost blotted in the fog of 
war, and saw the flash of our shells, breaking a 
little further off as the gunners " lifted," and 
knew that the moment had come. Then for 
one wild confused moment they knew that they 



i6 The Old Front Line 

were running towards that unknown land, which 
they could still see in the dust ahead. For a 
moment, they saw the parapet with the wire in 
front of it, and began, as they ran, to pick out 
in their minds a path through that wire. Then, 
too often, to many of them, the grass that they 
were crossing flew up in shards and sods and 
gleams of fire from the enemy shells, and those 
runners never reached the wire, but saw, per- 
haps, a flash, and the earth rushing nearer, and 
grasses against the sky, and then saw nothing 
more at all, for ever and for ever and for ever. 

It may be some years before those whose 
fathers, husbands and brothers were killed in 
this great battle, may be able to visit the battle- 
field where their dead are buried. Perhaps 
many of them, from brooding on the map, and 
from dreams and visions in the night, have in 
their minds an image or picture of that place. 
The following pages may help some few others, 
who have not already formed that image, to see 
the scene as it appears to-day. What it was like 
on the day of battle cannot be imagined by those 
who were not there. 

It was a day of an intense blue summer 
beauty, full of roaring, violence, and confusion 
of death, agony, and triumph, from dawn till 



The Old Front Line 27 

dark. All through that day, little rushes of the 
men of our race went towards that No Man's 
Land from the bloody shelter of our trenches. 
Some hardly left our trenches, many never 
crossed the green space, many died in the enemy 
wire, many had to fall back. Others won 
across and went further, and drove the enemy 
from his fort, and then back from line to line 
and from one hasty trenching to another, till 
the Battle of the Somme ended in the falling 
back of the enemy army. 

Those of our men who were in the line at 
Hebuterne, at the extreme northern end of the 
battlefield of the Somme, were opposite the 
enemy salient of Gommecourt. This was one 
of those projecting fortresses or flankers, like 
the Leipzig, Ovillers, and Fricourt, with which 
the enemy studded and strengthened his front 
line. It is doubtful if any point in the line in 
France was stronger than this point of Gomme- 
court. Those who visit it in future times may 
be surprised that such a place was so strong. 

All the country there is gentler and less de- 
cided than in the southern parts of the battle- 
field. Hebuterne stands on a plateau-top; to 
the east of it there is a gentle dip down to a shal- 
low hollow or valley; to the east of this again 



28 The Old Front Line 

there is a gentle rise to higher ground, on which 
the village of Gommecourt stood. The church 
of Gommecourt is almost exactly one mile 
northeast and by north from the church at 
Hebuterne ; both churches being at the hearts of 
their villages. 

Seen from our front line at Hebuterne, Gom- 
mecourt is little more than a few red-brick build- 
ings, standing in woodland on a rise of ground. 
Wood hides the village to the north, the west, 
and the southwest. A big spur of woodland, 
known as Gommecourt Park, thrusts out boldly 
from the village towards the plateau on which 
the English lines stood. This spur, strongly 
fortified by the enemy, made the greater part of 
the salient in the enemy line. The landscape 
away from the wood is not in any way remark- 
able, except that it is open, and gentle, and on a 
generous scale. Looking north from our posi- 
tion at Hebuterne there is the snout of the wood- 
land salient; looking south there is the green 
shallow shelving hollow or valley which made 
the No Man's Land for rather more than a 
mile. It is just such a gentle waterless hollow, 
like a dried-up river-bed, as one may see in sev- 
eral places in chalk country in England, but it 
is unenclosed land, and therefore more open and 
seemingly on a bigger scale than such a land- 



The Old Front Line 29 

scape would be in England, where most fields 
are small and fenced. Our old front line runs 
where the ground shelves or glides down into 
the valley; the enemy front line runs along the 
gentle rise up from the valley. The lines face 
each other across the slopes. To the south, the 
slope on which the enemy line stands is very 
slight. 

The impression given by this tract of land 
once held by the enemy is one of graceful gen- 
tleness. The wood on the little spur, even now, 
has something green about it. The village, 
once almost within the wood, wrecked to shat- 
ters as it is, has still a charm of situation. In 
the distance behind Gommecourt there is some 
ill-defined rising ground forming gullies and 
ravines. On these rises are some dark clumps 
of woodland, one of them called after the night- 
ingales, which perhaps sing there this year, in 
what is left of their home. There is nothing 
now to show that this quiet landscape was one 
of the tragical places of this war. 

The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and 
downland, like similar formations in England. 
It has about it, in every part of it, certain fea- 
tures well known to every one who has ever 
travelled in a chalk country. These features oc- 
cur even in the gentle, rolling, and not strongly 



30 The Old Front Line 

marked sector near Hebuterne. Two are very 
noticeable, the formation almost everywhere of 
those steep, regular banks or terraces, which 
the French call remblais and our own farmers 
lynchets, and the presence, in nearly all parts of 
the field, of roads sunken between two such 
banks into a kind of narrow gully or ravine. It 
is said, that these remblais or lynchets, which 
may be seen in English chalk countries, as in the 
Dunstable Downs, in the Chiltern Hills, and in 
many parts of Berkshire and Wiltshire, are 
made in each instance, in a short time, by the 
ploughing away from the top and bottom of any 
difficult slope. Where two slopes adjoin, such 
ploughing steepens the valley between them into 
a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a 
track through the crops when they are up. 
Sometimes, though less frequently, the farmer 
ploughs away from a used track on quite flat 
land, and by doing this on both sides of the 
track, he makes the track a causeway or ridge- 
way, slightly raised above the adjoining fields. 
This type of raised road or track can be seen in 
one or two parts of the battlefield (just above 
Hamel and near Pozieres for instance) , but the 
hollow or sunken road and the steep remblai or 
lynchet are everywhere. One may say that no 
quarter of a mile of the whole field is without 



The Old Front Line 31 

one or other of them. The sunken roads are 
sometimes very deep. Many of our soldiers, 
on seeing them, have thought that they were 
cuttings made, with great labour, through the 
chalk, and that the remblais or lynchets were 
piled up and smoothed for some unknown pur- 
pose by primitive man. Probably it will be 
found, that in every case they are natural slopes 
made sharper by cultivation. Two or three of 
these lynchets and sunken roads cross the shal- 
low valley of the No Man's Land near Hebu- 
terne. By the side of one of them, a line of 
Sixteen Poplars, now ruined, made a landmark 
between the lines. 

The line continues (with some slight east- 
ward trendings, but without a change in its gen- 
tle quiet) southwards from this point for about 
a mile to a slight jut, or salient in the enemy line. 
This jut was known by our men as the Point, 
and a very spiky point it was to handle. From 
near the Point on our side of No Man's Land, a 
bank or lynchet, topped along its edge with 
trees, runs southwards for about a mile. In 
four places, the trees about this lynchet grow in 
clumps or copses, which our men called after the 
four Evangelists, John, Luke, Mark, and Mat- 
thew. This bank marks the old English front 
line between the Point and the Serre Road a 



32 The Old Front Line 

mile to the south of it. Behind this English 
line are several small copses, on ground which 
very gently rises towards the crest of the plateau 
a mile to the west. In front of most of this 
part of our line, the ground rises towards the 
enemy trenches, so that one can see little to the 
front, but the slope up. The No Man's Land 
here is not green, but as full of shell-holes and 
the ruin of battle as any piece of the field. 
Directly between Serre and the Matthew Copse, 
where the lines cross a rough lump of ground, 
the enemy parapet is whitish from the chalk. 
The whitish parapet makes the skyline to ob- 
servers in the English line. Over that parapet, 
some English battalions made one of the most 
splendid charges of the battle, in the heroic at- 
tack on Serre four hundred yards beyond. 

To the right of our front at Matthew Copse 
the ground slopes southward a little, past what 
may once have been a pond or quarry, but is now 
a pit in the mud, to the Serre road. Here one 
can look up the muddy road to the hamlet of 
Serre, where the wrecks of some brick buildings 
stand in a clump of tree stumps, or half-right 
down a God-forgotten kind of glen, blasted by 
fire to the look of a moor in hell. A few ram- 
pikes of trees standing on one side of this glen 
give the place its name of Ten Tree Alley. Im- 



The Old Front Line 33 

mediately to the south of the Serre road, the 
ground rises into one of the many big chalk 
spurs, which thrust from the main Hebuterne 
plateau towards the Ancre Valley. The spur 
at this point runs east and west, and the lines 
cross it from north and south. They go up it 
side by side, a hundred and fifty yards apart, 
with a greenish No Man's Land between them. 
The No Man's Land, as usual, is the only part 
of all this chalk spur that is not burnt, gouged, 
pocked, and pitted with shell fire. It is, how- 
ever, enough marked by the war to be bad going. 
When they are well up the spur, the lines draw 
nearer, and at the highest point of the spur they 
converge in one of the terrible places of the bat- 
tlefield. 

For months before the battle began, it was a 
question here, which side should hold the high- 
est point of the spur. Right at the top of the 
spur there is one patch of ground, measuring, 
it may be, two hundred yards each way, from 
which one can see a long way in every direction. 
From this patch, the ground droops a little to- 
wards the English side and stretches away fairly 
flat towards the enemy side, but one can see far 
either way, and to have this power of seeing, 
both sides fought desperately. 

Until the beginning of the war, this spur of 



34 The Old Front Line 

ground was corn-land, like most of the battle- 
field. Unfenced country roads crossed it. It 
was a quiet, lonely, prosperous ploughland, 
stretching for miles, up and down, in great 
sweeping rolls and folds, like our own chalk 
downlands. It had one feature common to all 
chalk countries; it was a land of smooth ex- 
panses. Before the war, all this spur was a 
smooth expanse, which passed in a sweep from 
the slope to the plateau, over this crown of 
summit. 

To-day, the whole of the summit (which is 

called the Redan Ridge) , for all its two hundred 

yards, is blown into pits and craters from twenty 

to fifty feet deep, and sometimes fifty yards long. 

These pits and ponds in rainy weather fill up 

with water, which pours from one pond into 

another, so that the hill-top is loud with the 

noise of the brooks. For many weeks, the 

armies fought for this patch of hill. It was all 

mined, counter-mined, and re-mined, and at each 

explosion the crater was fought for and lost and 

won. It cannot be said that either side won 

that summit till the enemy was finally beaten 

from all that field, for both sides conquered 

enough to see from. On the enemy side, a 

fortification of heaped earth was made; on our 

side, castles were built of sandbags filled with 



The Old Front Line 35 

flint. These strongholds gave both sides 
enough observation. The works face each 
other across the ponds. The sandbags of the 
English works have now rotted, and flag about 
like the rags of uniform or like withered grass. 
The flint and chalk laid bare by their rotting 
look like the grey of weathered stone, so that, at 
a little distance, the English works look old and 
noble, as though they were the foundations of 
some castle long since fallen under Time. 

To the right, that is to the southward, from 
these English castles there is a slope of six hun- 
dred yards into a valley or gully. The slope is 
not in any way remarkable or seems not to be, 
except that the ruin of a road, now barely to be 
distinguished from the field, runs across it. 
The opposing lines of trenches go down the 
slope, much as usual, with the enemy line above 
on a slight natural glacis. Behind this enemy 
line is the bulk of the spur, which is partly white 
from up-blown chalk, partly burnt from months 
of fire, and partly faintly green from recovering 
grass. A little to the right or south, on this 
bulk of spur, there are the stumps of trees and 
no grass at all, nothing but upturned chalk and 
burnt earth. On the battlefield of the Somme, 
these are the marks of a famous place. 

The valley into which the slope descends is a 



36 The Old Front Line 

broadish gentle opening in the chalk hills, with 
a road running at right angles to the lines of 
trenches at the bottom of it. As the road de- 
scends, the valley tightens in, and just where the 
enemy line crosses it, it becomes a narrow deep 
glen or gash, between high and steep banks of 
chalk. Well within the enemy position and 
fully seven hundred yards from our line, an- 
other such glen or gash runs into this glen, at 
right angles. At this meeting place of the glens 
is or was the village of Beaumont Hamel, which 
the enemy said could never be taken. 

For the moment it need not be described; for 
it was not seen by many of our men in the early 
stages of the battle. In fact our old line was at 
least five hundred yards outside it. But all our 
line in the valley here was opposed to the village 
defences, and the fighting at this point was fierce 
and terrible, and there are some features in the 
No Man's Land just outside the village which 
must be described. These features run parallel 
with our line right down to the road in the val- 
ley, and though they are not features of great 
tactical importance, like the patch of summit 
above, where the craters are, or like the wind- 
mill at Pozieres, they were the last things seen 
by many brave Irish and Englishmen, and can- 
not be passed lightly by. 



The Old Front Line 37 

The features are a lane, fifty or sixty yards in 
front of our front trench, and a remblai or 
lynchet fifty or sixty yards in front of the lane. 

The lane is a farmer's track leading from the 
road in the valley to the road on the spur. It 
runs almost north and south, like the lines of 
trenches, and is about five hundred yards long. 
From its start in the valley-road to a point about 
two hundred yards up the spur it is sunken below 
the level of the field on each side of it. At first 
the sinking is slight, but it swiftly deepens as it 
goes up hill. For more than a hundred yards 
it lies between banks twelve or fifteen feet deep. 
After this part the banks die down into insignifi- 
cance, so that the road is nearly open. The 
deep part, which is like a very deep, broad, 
natural trench, was known to our men as the 
Sunken Road. The banks of this sunken part 
are perpendicular. Until recently, they were 
grown over with a scrub of dwarf beech, ash, 
and sturdy saplings, now mostly razed by fire. 
In the road itself our men built up walls of sand- 
bags to limit the effects of enemy shell fire. 
From these defences steps cut in the chalk of the 
bank lead to the field above, where there were 
machine-gun pits. 

The field in front of the lane (where these 
pits were) is a fairly smooth slope for about 



38 The Old Front Line 

fifty yards. Then there is the lynchet or rem- 
blai, like a steep cliff, from three to twelve feet 
high, hardly to be noticed from above until the 
traveller is upon it. Below this lynchet is a 
fairly smooth slope, so tilted that it slopes down 
to the right towards the valley road, and slopes 
up to the front towards the enemy line. Look- 
ing straight to the front from the Sunken Road 
our men saw no sudden dip down at the lynchet, 
but a continuous grassy field, at first flat, then 
slowly rising towards the enemy parapet. The 
line of the lynchet-top merges into the slope 
behind it, so that it is not seen. The enemy 
line thrusts out in a little salient here, so as to 
make the most of a little bulge of ground which 
was once wooded and still has stumps. The 
bulge is now a heap and ruin of burnt and 
tumbled mud and chalk. To reach it our men 
had to run across the flat from the Sunken 
Road, slide down the bank of the lynchet, and 
then run up the glacis to the parapet. 

The Sunken Road was only held by our men 
as an advanced post and " jumping off " (or at- 
tacking) point. Our line lay behind it on a 
higher part of the spur, which does not decline 
gradually into the valley road, but breaks off in 
a steep bank cut by our soldiers into a flight of 
chalk steps. These steps gave to all this part 



The Old Front Line 39 

of the line the name of Jacob's Ladder. From 
the top of Jacob's Ladder there is a good view 
of the valley road running down into Beaumont 
Hamel. To the right there is a big steep knoll 
of green hill bulking up to the south of the val- 
ley, and very well fenced with enemy wire. All 
the land to the right or south of Jacob's Ladder 
is this big green hill, which is very steep, irregu- 
lar, and broken with banks, and so ill-adapted 
for trenching that we were forced to make our 
line further from the enemy than is usual on the 
front. The front trenches here are nearly five 
hundred yards apart. As far as the hill-top the 
enemy line has a great advantage of position. 
To reach it our men had to cross the open and 
ascend a slope which gave neither dead ground 
nor cover to front or flank. Low down the hill, 
running parallel with the road, is a little lyncher, 
topped by a few old hawthorn bushes. All this 
bit of the old front line was the scene of a most 
gallant attack by our men on the 1st of July. 
Those who care may see it in the official cine- 
matograph films of the Battle of the Somme. 

Right at the top of the hill there is a dark en- 
closure of wood, orchard, and plantation, with 
several fairly well preserved red-brick buildings 
in it. This is the plateau-village of Auchon- 
villers. On the slopes below it, a couple of hun- 



40 The Old Front Line 

dred yards behind Jacob's Ladder, there is a 
little round clump of trees. Both village and 
clump make conspicuous landmarks. The 
clump was once the famous English machine- 
gun post of the Bowery, from which our men 
could shoot down the valley into Beaumont 
Hamel. 

The English line goes up the big green hill, in 
trenches and saps of reddish clay, to the plateau 
or tableland at the top. Right up on the top, 
well behind our front line and close to one of 
our communication trenches, there is a good big 
hawthorn bush, in which a magpie has built her 
nest. This bush, which is strangely beautiful in 
the spring, has given to the plateau the name of 
the Hawthorn Ridge. 

Just where the opposing lines reach the top 
of the Ridge they both bend from their main 
north and south direction towards the south- 
east, and continue in that course for several 
miles. At the point or salient of the bending, 
in the old enemy position, there is a crater of a 
mine which the English sprang in the early 
morning of the ist of July. This is the crater 
of the mine of Beaumont Hamel. Until re- 
cently it was supposed to be the biggest crater 
ever blown by one explosion. It is not the 
deepest: one or two others near La Boisselle are 




a 



.5 






c 

< 



The Old Front Line 41 

deeper, but none on the Somme field comes near 
it in bigness and squalor. It is like the crater of 
a volcano, vast, ragged, and irregular, about one 
hundred and fifty yards long, one hundred yards 
across, and twenty-five yards deep. It is 
crusted and scabbed with yellowish tetter, like 
sulphur or the rancid fat on meat. The inside 
has rather the look of meat, for it is reddish 
and all streaked and scabbed with this pox and 
with discoloured chalk. A lot of it trickles and 
oozes like sores discharging pus, and this liquid 
gathers in holes near the bottom, and is greenish 
and foul and has the look of dead eyes staring 
upwards. 

All that can be seen of it from the English 
line is a disarrangement of the enemy wire and 
parapet. It is a hole in the ground which can- 
not be seen except from quite close at hand. At 
first sight, on looking into it, it is difficult to be- 
lieve that it was the work of man; it looks so 
like nature in her evil mood. It is hard to 
imagine that only three years ago that hill was 
cornfield, and the site of the chasm grew bread. 
After that happy time, the enemy bent his line 
there and made the salient a stronghold, and 
dug deep shelters for his men in the walls of his 
trenches ; the marks of the dugouts are still plain 
in the sides of the pit. Then, on the 1st of July, 



42 The Old Front Line 

when the explosion was to be a signal lor the 
attack, and our men waited in the trenches lor 
the spring, the belly of the chalk was heaved, 
and chalk, elay, dugouts, gear, and enemy, went 
Up in a dome o! blackness lull of pieces, and 
spread aloft like a toadstool, and floated, and 
fell down. 

From the top of the Hawthorn Ridge, our 
soldiers could see a great expanse of chalk 
downland, though the falling of the hill kept 
them from seeing the enemy's position. That 
lay on the slope of the ridge, somewhere behind 
the wire, quite out of sight from our lines. 
Looking out from our front line at this salient, 
our men saw the enemy wire almost as a skyline. 
Beyond this line, the ground dipped towards 
Beaumont 1 lamel (which was quite out of sight 
in the valley) and rose again sharply in the 
steep bulk of Beaucourt spur. Beyond this 
lonely spur, the hills ranked and ran, like the 
masses of a moor, first the high ground above 
Miraumont, and beyond that the high ground of 
the Loup art Wood, and away to the east the 
bulk that makes the left bank of the Ancre 
River. What trees there are in this moorland 
were not then all blasted. Even in Beaumont 
1 lamel some of the trees were green. The 
trees in the Ancre River Valley made all that 



The Old Front Line 43 

marshy meadow like a forest. Looking out on 
all this, the first thought of the soldier was that 
here he could really see something of the 
enemy's ground. 

It is true, that from this hill-top much land, 
then held by the enemy, could be seen, but very 
little that was vital to the enemy could be ob- 
served. His lines of supply and support ran 
in ravines which we could not see ; his batteries 
lay beyond crests, his men were in hiding places. 
Just below us on the lower slopes of this Haw- 
thorn Ridge he had one vast hiding place which 
gave us a great deal of trouble. This was a 
gully or ravine, about five hundred yards long, 
well within his position, running (roughly speak- 
ing) at right angles with his front line. Prob- 
ably it was a steep and deep natural fold made 
steeper and deeper by years of cultivation. It 
is from thirty to forty feet deep, and about as 
much across at the top ; it has abrupt sides, and 
thrusts out two forks to its southern side. 
These forks give it the look of a letter Y upon 
the maps, for which reason both the French and 
ourselves called the place the " Ravin en Y " 
or " Y Ravine." Part of the southernmost 
fork was slightly open to observation from our 
lines ; the main bulk of the gully was invisible to 
us, except from the air. 



44 The Old Front Line 

Whenever the enemy has had a bank of any 
kind, at all screened from fire, he has dug into it 
for shelter. In the Y Ravine, which provided 
these great expanses of banks, he dug himself 
shelters of unusual strength and size. He 
sank shafts into the banks, tunnelled long living 
rooms, both above and below the gully-bottom, 
linked the rooms together with galleries, and 
cut hatchways and bolting holes to lead to the 
surface as well as to the gully. All this work 
was securely done, with balks of seasoned 
wood, iron girders, and concreting. Much of 
it was destroyed by shell fire during the battle, 
but much not hit by shells is in good condition 
to-day even after the autumn rains and the 
spring thaw. The galleries which lead upwards 
and outwards from this underground barracks 
to the observation posts and machine-gun em- 
placements in the open air, are cunningly 
planned and solidly made. The posts and em- 
placements to which they led are now, however, 
(nearly all) utterly destroyed by our shell fire. 

In this gully barracks, and in similar shelters 
cut in the chalk of the steeper banks near Beau- 
mont Hamel, the enemy could hold ready large 
numbers of men to repel an attack or to make a 
counter-attack. They lived in these dugouts in 
comparative safety and in moderate comfort. 



The Old Front Line 45 

When our attacks came during the early months 
of the battle, they were able to pass rapidly and 
safely by these underground galleries from one 
part of the position to another, bringing their 
machine guns with them. However, the Ra- 
vine was presently taken and the galleries and 
underground shelters were cleared. In one un- 
derground room in that barracks, nearly fifty 
of the enemy were found lying dead in their 
bunks, all unwounded, and as though asleep. 
They had been killed by the concussion of the 
air following on the burst of a big shell at the 
entrance. 

One other thing may be mentioned about this 
Hawthorn Ridge. It runs parallel with the 
next spur (the Beaucourt spur) immediately to 
the north of it, then in the enemy's hands. Just 
over the crest of this spur, out of sight from our 
lines, is a country road, well banked and 
screened, leading from Beaucourt to Serre. 
This road was known by our men as Artillery 
Lane, because it was used as a battery position 
by the enemy. The wrecks of several of his 
guns lie in the mud there still. From the crest 
in front of this road there is a view to the west- 
ward, so wonderful that those who see it realize 
at once that the enemy position on the Ridge, 
which, at a first glance, seems badly sited for 



46 The Old Front Line 

observation, is, really, well placed. From this 
crest, the Ridge-top, all our old front line, and 
nearly all the No Man's Land upon it, is ex- 
posed, and plainly to be seen. On a reasonably 
clear day, no man could leave our old line un- 
seen from this crest. No artillery officer, cor- 
recting the fire of a battery, could ask for a bet- 
ter place from which to watch the bursts of his 
shells. This crest, in front of the lane of enemy 
guns, made it possible for the enemy batteries to 
drop shells upon our front line trenches before 
all the men were out of them at the instant of 
the great attack. 

The old English line runs along the Haw- 
thorn Ridge-top for some hundreds of yards, 
and then crosses a dip or valley, which is the 
broad, fanshaped, southern end of a fork of Y 
Ravine. A road runs, or ran, down this dip 
into the Y Ravine. It is not now recognisable 
as a road, but the steep banks at each side of it, 
and some bluish metalling in the shell holes, 
show that one once ran there. These banks are 
covered with hawthorn bushes. A remblai, 
also topped with hawthorn, lies a little to the 
north of this road. 

From this lynchet, looking down the valley 
into the Y Ravine, the enemy position is saddle- 
shaped, low in the middle, where the Y Ravine 



The Old Front Line 47 

narrows, and rising to right and left to a good 
height. Chalk hills from their form often seem 
higher than they really are, especially in any 
kind of haze. Often they have mystery and 
nearly always beauty. For some reason, the 
lumping rolls of chalk hill rising up on each side 
of this valley have a menace and a horror about 
them. One sees little of the enemy position 
from the English line. It is now nothing but a 
track of black wire in front of some burnt and 
battered heapings of the ground, upon which 
the grass and the flowers have only now begun 
to push. At the beginning of the battle it must 
have been greener and fresher, for then the fire 
of hell had not come upon it; but even then, 
even in the summer day, that dent in the chalk 
leading to the Y Ravine must have seemed a 
threatening and forbidding place. 

Our line goes along the top of the ridge here, 
at a good distance from the enemy line. It is 
dug on the brow of the plateau in reddish earth 
on the top of chalk. It is now much as our men 
left it for the last time. The trench-ladders by 
which they left it are still in place in the bays of 
the trenches. All the outer, or jumping-off, 
trenches, are much destroyed by enemy shell fire, 
which was very heavy here from both sides of 
the Ancre River. A quarter of a mile to the 



4 S The Old Front Line 

southeast oi the V Ravine the line comes within 

sight oi the great gap which cuts the battlefield 
in two. This gap is the valley oi the Ancre 
River, which runs here beneath great spurs ot 
chalk, as the Thames runs at Goring and Tang- 
bourne. C">n the lonely hill, where this first 
comes plainly into view, as one travels south 
along the line, there used to be two bodies ot 
English soldiers, buried once, and then unburicd 
by the rain. They lay in the No Man's Land, 
outside the English wire, in what was then owe 
of the loneliest places in the held. The ruin of 
war lay all round them. 

There are many English graves (marked, 
then, hurriedly, by the man's rifle thrust into the 
ground) in that piece ot" the line. On a windy 
day, these rifles shook in the wind as the bay- 
onets bent to the blast. The field testaments of 
both men lay open beside them in the mud. 
The rain and the mud together had nearly de- 
stroyed the little books, but in each case it was 
possible to read one text. In both cases, the 
text which remained, read with a strange irony. 
The one book, beside a splendid youth, cut oft' in 
his promise, was open at a text which ran, 
"And Moses was learned in all the wisdom of 
the Egyptians and mighty in word and in deed." 
The other book, beside one who had been killed 



The Old Front Line 49 

in an attack which did not succeed at the mo- 
ment, but which led to the falling back of the 
enemy nation from many miles of conquered 
ground, read even more strangely. It was open 
at the eighty-ninth Psalm, and the only legible 
words were, " Thou hast broken down all his 
hedges; thou hast brought his strong holds to 



ruin." 



From the hill-top where these graves are the 
lines droop down towards the second of the four 
roads, which runs here in the Ancre valley 
parallel with the river and the railway. The 
slope is steep and the ground broken with shal- 
low gullies and lynchets. Well down towards 
the river, just above the road, a nattish piece of 
land leads to a ravine with steep and high banks. 
This nattish land, well within the enemy line, 
was the scene of very desperate fighting on the 
1st of July. 

Looking at the enemy line in front of our own 
line here, one sees little but a gentle crest, pro- 
tected by wire, in front of another gentle crest, 
also wired, with other gentle crests beyond and 
to the left. To the right there is a blur of 
gentle crests behind tree-tops. It is plain from 
a glance that gullies run irregularly into the 
spurs here, and make the defence easy. All 
through the fighting here, it happened too often 



50 The Old Front Line 

that the taking of one crest only meant that the 
winners were taken in flank by machine guns in 
the crest beyond, and (in this bit of the line) 
by other guns on the other side of the river. 

Well to the back of the English line here, on 
the top of the plateau, level with Auchonvillers, 
some trees stand upon the skyline, with the 
tower of a church, battered, but not destroyed, 
like the banner of some dauntless one, a little 
to the west of the wood. The wood shows 
marks of shelling, but nothing like the marks 
on the woods attacked by our own men. There 
are signs of houses among the trees, and the line 
of a big wood to the east of them. 

This church and the buildings near it are 
parts of Mesnil village, most of which lies out 
of sight on the further side of the crest. They 
are conspicuous landmarks, and can be made out 
from many parts of the field. The chalk scarp 
on which they stand is by much the most beauti- 
ful thing on the battlefield, and the sight of 
Mesnil church tower on the top of it is most 
pleasant. That little banner stood all through 
the war, and not all the guns of the enemy could 
bring it down. Many men in the field near 
Mesnil, enduring the mud of the thaw, and the 
lice, wet, and squalor of dugouts near the front, 
were cheered by that church tower. " For all 



The Old Front Line 51 

their bloody talk the bastards couldn't bring it 
down." 

The hill with the lines upon it slopes steeply 
down to the valley of the Ancre. Just where 
the lines come to the valley, the ground drops 
abruptly, in a cliff or steep bank, twenty-five feet 
high, to the road. 

Our line on this slope covers the village of 
Hamel, which lies just behind the line, along 
the road and on the hill-slopes above it. The 
church and churchyard of Hamel, both utterly 
ruined, lie well up the hill in such a position that 
they made good posts from which our snipers 
could shoot across the river at men in the 
Schwaben Redoubt. Crocuses, snowdrops, and 
a purple flower once planted on the graves of 
the churchyard, but now escaped into the field, 
blossomed here in this wintry spring, long be- 
fore any other plant on the battlefield was in 
bud. 

Hamel in peace time may have contained 
forty houses, some shatters of which still stand. 
There are a few red-brick walls, some frames 
of wood from which the plaster has been blown, 
some gardens gone wild, fruit trees unpruned 
and more or less ragged from fire, and an air of 
desecration and desertion. In some of the 
ruins there are signs of use. The lower 



52 The Old Front Line 

windows are filled with sandbags, the lower 
stories are strengthened with girders and 
baulks. From the main road in the valley, a 
country track or road, muddy even for the 
Somme, leads up the hill, through the heart of 
the village, past the church, towards our old line 
and Auchonvillers. 

Not much can be seen from the valley road in 
Hamel, for it is only a few feet above the level 
of the river-bed, which is well grown with 
timber not yet completely destroyed. The gen- 
eral view to the eastward from this low-lying 
road is that of a lake, five hundred yards across, 
in some wild land not yet settled. The lake is 
shallow, blind with reeds, vivid with water- 
grass, and lively with moor-fowl. The trees 
grow out of the water, or lie in it, just as they 
fell when they were shot. On the whole, the 
trees just here, though chipped and knocked 
about, have not suffered badly; they have the 
look of trees, and are leafy in summer. 
Beyond the trees, on the other side of the 
marsh, is the steep and high eastern bank of 
the Ancre, on which a battered wood, called 
Thiepval Wood, stands like an army of black 
and haggard rampikes. But for this stricken 
wood, the eastern bank of the Ancre is a gentle, 



The Old Front Line 53 

sloping hill, bare of trees. On the top of this 
hill is the famous Schwaben Redoubt. 

The Ancre River and the marshy valley 
through which it runs are crossed by sev- 
eral causeways. One most famous causeway 
crosses just in front of Hamel on the line of 
the old Mill Road. The Mill from which it 
takes its name lies to the left of the causeway 
on a sort of green island. The wheel, which is 
not destroyed, still shows among the ruins. 
The enemy had a dressing station there at one 
time. 

The marshy valley of the Ancre splits up the 
river here into several channels besides the mill 
stream. The channels are swift and deep, full 
of exquisitely clear water just out of the chalk. 
The marsh is rather blind with snags cut off 
by shells. For some years past the moor-fowl 
in the marsh have been little molested. They 
are very numerous here; their cries make the 
place lonely and romantic. 

When one stands on this causeway over the 
Ancre one is almost at the middle point of the 
battlefield, for the river cuts the field in two. 
Roughly speaking, the ground to the west of 
the river was the scene of containing fighting, 
the ground to the east of the river the scene of 



54 The Old Front Line 

our advance. At the eastern end of the cause- 
way the Old Mill Road rises towards the 
Schwaben Redoubt. 

All the way up the hill the road is steep, 
rather deep and bad. It is worn into the chalk 
and shows up very white in sunny weather. 
Before the battle it lay about midway between 
the lines, but it was always patrolled at night by 
our men. The ground on both sides of it is 
almost more killed and awful than anywhere 
in the field. On the English or south side of it, 
distant from one hundred to two hundred yards, 
is the shattered wood, burnt, dead, and deso- 
late. On the enemy side, at about the same dis- 
tance, is the usual black enemy wire, much 
tossed and bunched by our shells, covering a 
tossed and tumbled chalky and filthy parapet. 
Our own old line is an array of rotted sand- 
bags, filled with chalkflint, covering the burnt 
wood. One need only look at the ground to 
know that the fighting here was very grim, and 
to the death. Near the road and up the slope 
to the enemy the ground is littered with relics 
of our charges, mouldy packs, old shattered 
scabbards, rifles, bayonets, helmets curled, 
torn, rolled, and starred, clips of cartridges, 
and very many graves. Many of the graves 



The Old Front Line 55 

are marked with strips of wood torn from pack- 
ing cases, with pencilled inscriptions, " An un- 
known British Hero " ; " In loving memory of 

Pte. "; " Two unknown British heroes " ; 

" An unknown British soldier " ; u A dead 
Fritz." That gentle slope to the Schwaben is 
covered with such things. 

Passing these things, by some lane through 
the wire and clambering over the heaps of earth 
which were once the parapet, one enters the 
Schwaben, where so much life was spent. As 
in so many places on this old battlefield, the first 
thought is: "Why, they were in an eyrie 
here ; our fellows had no chance at all." There 
is no wonder, then, that the approach is strewn 
with graves. The line stands at the top of a 
smooth, open slope, commanding our old posi- 
tion and the Ancre Valley. There is no cover 
of any kind upon the slope except the rims of the 
shell-holes, which make rings of mud among 
the grass. Just outside the highest point of the 
front line there is a little clump of our graves. 
Just inside there is a still unshattered concrete 
fortlet, built for the machine gun by which those 
men were killed. 

All along that front trench of the Schwaben, 
lying on the parapet, half buried in the mud, 
are the belts of machine guns, still full of 



56 The Old Front Line 

cartridges. There were many machine guns on 
that earthen wall last year. When our men 
scrambled over the tumbled chalky line of old 
sandbags, so plain just down the hill, and came 
into view on the slope, running and stumbling 
in the hour of the attack, the machine gunners in 
the fortress felt indeed that they were in an 
eyrie, and that our fellows had no chance at 
all. 

For the moment one thinks this, as the enemy 
gunners must have thought it; then, looking up 
the hill at the inner works of the great fort, the 
thought comes that it was not so happy a fate 
to have to hold this eyrie. Sometimes, in 
winter storms, the Atlantic is heaved aloft and 
tossed and tumbled under an evil heaven till 
all its wilderness is hideous. This hill-top is 
exactly as though some such welter of water had 
suddenly become mud. It is all heaped and 
tossed and tumbled as though the earth there 
had been a cross-sea. In one place some great 
earth wave of a trench has been bitten into and 
beaten back and turned blind into an eddy by 
great pits and chasms and running heaps. 
Then in another place, where the crown of the 
work once reared itself aloft over the hill, the 
heaps of mud are all blurred and pounded to- 
gether, so that there is no design, no trace, no 



The Old Front Line 57 

visible plan of any fortress, only a mess of mud 
bedevilled and bewildered. All this mess of 
heaps and hillocks is strung and filthied over 
with broken bodies and ruined gear. There is 
nothing whole, nor alive, nor clean, in all its 
extent; it is a place of ruin and death, blown 
and blasted out of any likeness to any work 
of man, and so smashed that there is no shelter 
on it, save for the one machine gunner in his 
box. On all that desolate hill our fire fell like 
rain for days and nights and weeks, till the 
watchers in our line could see no hill at all, but 
a great, vague, wreathing devil of darkness in 
which little sudden fires winked and glimmered 
and disappeared. 

Once in a lull of the firing a woman ap- 
peared upon the enemy parapet and started to 
walk along it. Our men held their fire and 
watched her. She walked steadily along the 
whole front of the Schwaben and then jumped 
down into her trench. Many thought at the 
time that she was a man masquerading for a 
bet, but long afterwards, when our men took 
the Schwaben, they found her lying in the ruins 
dead. They buried her there, up on the top 
of the hill. God alone knows who she was and 
what she was doing there. 

Looking back across the Ancre from the 



5« 



The Old Front Line 



Schwa bo 11 the hill oi (he right hank <>l the river 
is clear from the woods near Mcsnil to Beau- 
court. All along that graceful chalk lull our 
conununication trenches thrust up like long 
white mole-runs, or like the comb of rollers 
on a reel. At right angles to these long white 
lines are black streaks which mark the enemy's 
successive I rout lines. The later ones are 
visibly more ragged than those near our old 
line. 

There are few more lonely places than that 
scene ol old battles. Owe may stand i>n the 
Schwabcu lor many days together and look west 
over the moor, or east over the wilderness, 
without seeing any sign ol human lile, save per- 
haps sonic solitary guarding a dump ol stores. 

The hill on which the Schwabcu is built is 
like a great thumb laid down beside the Ancre 
River. There is a little valley on its eastern 
side exactly like the space between a great 
thumb and a great lorelinger. It is called 
Crucifix \ alley, from an iron Calvary that 
stood in it in the early days ol the war. It must 
once have been a lovely and romantic glen, 
strangely beautiful throughout. Kvcn now its 
lower reach between a steep bank ol scrub 
and Thiepval Wood is as lovely as a place can 
be alter the passing ol a cyclone. Its upper 



The Old Front Line 59 

reach, which makes the eastern boundary of the 
Schwaben, is as ghastly a scene of smash as 
the world can show. It is nothing but a collec- 
tion of irregular pools dug by big shells during 
months of battle. The pools are long enough 
and deep enough to dive into, and full to over- 
flowing with filthy water. Sometimes the pres- 
sure of the water bursts the mud banks of one 
of these pools and a rush of water comes, and 
the pools below it overflow, and a noise of 
water rises in that solitude which is like the 
mud and water of the beginning of the world 
before any green thing appeared. 

Our line runs across this Crucifix Valley in a 
strong sandbag barricade. The enemy line 
crosses it higher up in a continuation of the 
front line of the Schwaben. As soon as the 
lines are across the valley they turn sharply to 
the south at an important point. 

The Schwaben spur is like a thumb; Crucifix 
Valley is like the space between a thumb and a 
forefinger. Just to the east of Crucifix Valley 
a second spur thrusts away down to the south 
like a forefinger. It is a long sloping spur, 
wooded at the lower end. It is known on the 
maps as Thiepval Hill or the Leipzig Salient. 
When the lines turn to the south after crossing 
Crucifix Valley they run along the side of this 



60 The Old Front Line 

hill and pass out of sight round the end. The 
lines are quite regular and distinct. From the 
top of the Schwaben it looks as though the 
side of the hill were fenced into a neat green 
track or racecourse. This track is the No 
Man's Land, which lies like a broad green 
regular stripe between brown expanses along 
the hillside. All this hill was of the greatest 
importance to the enemy. It was as strong an 
eyrie as the Schwaben; it turned and made very 
dangerous our works in front of Hamel; and 
it was the key to a covered way to the plateau 
from which all these spurs thrust southward. 

It is a bolder, more regular spur than the 
others which thrust from this plateau. The 
top slopes so slightly as to be almost level, the 
two flanks are rather steep. 

Right at the top of it, just where it springs 
from the plateau, much where the knuckle of the 
imagined hand would be, and perhaps five 
hundred yards east from our old sandbag bar- 
ricade in Crucifix Valley, there is a redness in 
the battered earth and upon the chalk of the 
road. The redness is patchy over a good big 
stretch of this part of the spur, but it is all with- 
in the enemy lines and well above our own. 
Where the shattered hillside slopes towards our 
lines there are many remnants of trees, some of 



The Old Front Line 61 

them fruit trees arranged in a kind of order be- 
hind the burnt relics of a hedge, others dotted 
about at random. All are burnt, blasted, and 
killed. One need only glance at the hill on 
which they stand to see that it has been more 
burnt and shell-smitten than most parts of the 
lines. It is as though the fight here had been 
more than to the death, to beyond death, to the 
bones and skeleton of the corpse which was yet 
unkillable. This is the site of the little hill 
village of Thiepval, which once stood at a cross- 
roads here among apple orchards and the trees 
of a park. It had a church, just at the junction 
of the roads, and a fine siegneurial chateau, in a 
garden, beside the church; otherwise it was a lit- 
tle lonely mean place, built of brick and plaster 
on a great lonely heap of chalk downland. It 
had no importance and no history before the 
war, except that a Seigneur of Thiepval is men- 
tioned as having once attended a meeting at 
Amiens. It was of great military importance 
at the time of the Battle of the Somme. In the 
old days it may have had a beauty of position. 

It is worth while to clamber up to Thiepval 
from our lines. The road runs through the 
site of the village in a deep cutting, which may 
have once been lovely. The road is reddish 
with the smashed bricks of the village. Here 



62 The Old Front Line 

and there in the mud are perhaps three courses 
of brick where a house once stood, or some 
hideous hole bricked at the bottom for the 
vault of a cellar. Blasted, dead, pitted stumps 
of trees, with their bark in rags, grow here and 
there in a collection of vast holes, ten feet deep 
and fifteen feet across, with filthy water in them. 
There is nothing left of the church; a big red- 
dish mound of brick, that seems mainly powder 
round a core of cement, still marks where the 
chateau stood. The chateau garden, the round 
village pond, the pine-tree which was once a 
landmark there, are all blown out of recogni- 
tion. 

The mud of the Somme, which will be re- 
membered by our soldiers long after they have 
forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval 
than elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been 
worse elsewhere. The road through Thiepval 
was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near 
the chateau there were bits where one sank to 
the knee. In the great battle for Thiepval, on 
the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks 
charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and 
stuck fast and remained in the mud, like a great 
animal stricken dead in its spring. It was one 
of the sights of Thiepval during the winter, 



The Old Front Line 63 

for it looked most splendid; afterwards, it was 
salved and went to fight again. 

From this part of Thiepval one can look 
along the top of the Leipzig Spur, which begins 
here and thrusts to the south for a thousand 
yards. 

There are two big enemy works on the Leip- 
zig Spur: one, well to the south of the village, 
is (or was, for it is all blown out of shape) 
a six-angled star-shaped redoubt called the 
Wonder Work; the other, still further to the 
south, about a big, disused, and very evil-look- 
ing quarry, towards the end of the spur, is, or 
was, called the Leipzig Salient, or, by some 
people, the Hohenzollern, from the Hohen- 
zollern Trench, which ran straight across the 
spur about halfway down the salient. 

In these two fortresses the enemy had two 
strong, evil eyries, high above us. They look 
down upon our line, which runs along the side 
of the hill below them. Though, in the end, 
our guns blasted the enemy off the hill, our line 
along that slope was a costly one to hold, since 
fire upon it could be observed and directed from 
so many points — from the rear (above 
Hamel), from the left flank (on the Schwaben 
and near Thiepval), and from the hill itself. 



64 The Old Front Line 

The hill is all skinned and scarred, and the trace 
of the great works can no longer be followed. 
At the top of the hill, in the middle of a filthy 
big pool, is a ruined enemy trench-mortar, 
sitting up like a swollen toad. 

At the end of the spur the lines curve round 
to the east to shut in the hill. A grass-grown 
road crosses the lines here, goes up to the hill- 
top, and then along it. The slopes at this end 
of the hill are gentle, and from low down, 
where our lines are, it is a pleasant and grace- 
ful brae, where the larks never cease to sing 
and where you may always put up partridges 
and sometimes even a hare. It is a deserted 
hill at this time, but for the wild things. The 
No Man's Land is littered with the relics of a 
charge ; for many brave Dorsetshire and Wilt- 
shire men died in the rush up that slope. On 
the highest point of the enemy parapet, at the 
end of the hill, is a lonely white cross, which 
stands out like a banner planted by a conquerer. 
It marks the grave of an officer of the Wilts, 
who was killed there, among the ruin, in the 
July attack. 

Below the lines, where the ground droops 
away toward the river, the oddly shaped, 
deeply-vallied Wood of Authuille begins. It 



The Old Front Line 65 

makes a sort of socket of woodland so curved 
as to take the end of the spur. 

It is a romantic and very lovely wood, 
pleasant with the noise of water and not badly 
damaged by the fighting. The trees are alive 
and leafy, the shrubs are pushing, and the 
spring flowers, wood anemones, violets, and the 
oxlip (which in this country takes the place of 
the primrose and the cowslip) flower beauti- 
fully among the shell-holes, rags, and old tins 
of war. But at the north-eastern end it runs 
out in a straggling spinney along the Leipzig's 
east flank, and this horn of wood is almost as 
badly shattered as if the shell fire upon it had 
been English. Here the enemy, fearing for his 
salient, kept up a terrible barrage. The trees 
are burnt, ragged, unbarked, topped, and cut 
off short, the trenches are blown in and jumbled, 
and the ground blasted and gouged. 

Standing in the old English front line just 
to the north of Authuille Wood, one sees the 
usual slow gradual grassy rise to the dark enemy 
wire. Mesnil stands out among its trees to 
the left; to the right is this shattered stretch 
of wood, with a valley beyond it, and a rather 
big, steep, green hill topped by a few trees 
beyond the valley. The jut of the Leipzig 



66 The Old Front Line 

shuts out the view to the flanks, so that one 
can see little more than this. 

The Leipzig, itself, like the Schwaben, is a 
hawk's nest or eyrie. Up there one can look 
down by Authuille Wood to Albert church and 
chimneys, the uplands of the Somme, the 
Amiens road, down which the enemy marched in 
triumph and afterwards retreated in a hurry, 
and the fair fields that were to have been the 
booty of this war. Away to the left of this is 
the wooded clump of Becourt, and, beyond it, 
One Tree Hill with its forlorn mound, like the 
burial place of a King. On the right flank is 
the Ancre Valley, with the English position 
round Hamel like an open book under the eye ; 
on the left flank is the rather big, steep, green 
hill, topped by a few trees, before mentioned. 
These trees grow in and about what was once 
the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle. The hill 
does not seem to have a name; it may be called 
here Middle Finger Hill or Ovillers Hill. 

Like the Schwaben and the Leipzig Hills this 
hill thrusts out from the knuckle of the big 
chalk plateau to the north of it like the finger 
of a hand, in this case the middle finger. It is 
longer and less regularly defined than the Leip- 
zig Hill; because instead of ending, it merges 
into other hills not quite so high. The valley 



The Old Front Line 67 

which parts it from the Leipzig is steeply sided, 
with the banks of great lynchets. The lines 
cross the valley obliquely and run north and 
south along the flank of this hill, keeping their 
old relative positions, the enemy line well above 
our own, so that the approach to it is up a 
glacis. 

As one climbs up along our old line here, the 
great flank of Ovillers Hill is before one in a 
noble, bare sweep of grass, running up to the 
enemy line. Something in the make of this hill, 
in its shape, or in the way it catches the light, 
gives it a strangeness which other parts of the 
battlefield have not. The rise between the 
lines of the trenches is fully two hundred yards 
across, perhaps more. Nearly all over it, in 
no sort of order, now singly, now in twos or 
threes, just as the men fell, are the crosses of 
the graves of the men who were killed in the at- 
tack there. Here and there among the little 
crosses is one bigger than the rest, to some man 
specially loved or to the men of some battalion. 
It is difficult to stand in the old English line 
from which those men started without the feel- 
ing that the crosses are the men alive, still going 
forward, as they went in the July morning a 
year ago. 

Just within the enemy line, three-quarters of 



68 The Old Front Line 

the way up the hill, there is a sort of small 
flat field about fifty yards across where the 
enemy lost very heavily. They must have 
gathered there for some rush and then been 
caught by our guns. 

At the top of the hill the lines curve to the 
southeast, drawing closer together. The crest 
of the hill, such as it is, was not bitterly disputed 
here, for we could see all that we wished to 
see of the hill from the eastern flank. Our 
line passes over the spur slightly below it, the 
enemy line takes in as much of it as the enemy 
needed. From it, he has a fair view of Albert 
town and of the country to the east and west 
of it, the wooded hill of Becourt, and the hill 
above Fricourt. From our line, we see his line 
and a few tree-tops. From the eastern flank 
of the hill, our line gives a glimpse of the site of 
the village of Ovillers-la-Boisselle, once one of 
the strong places of the enemy, and now a few 
heaps of bricks, and one spike of burnt ruin 
where the church stood. 

Like most Picardy villages, Ovillers was 
compactly built of red brick along a country 
road, with trees and orchards surrounding it. 
It had a lofty and pretentious brick church of 
a modern type. Below and beyond it to the 
east is a long and not very broad valley which 



The Old Front Line 69 

lies between the eastern flank of Ovillers Hill 
and the next spur. It is called Mash Valley on 
the maps. The lines go down Ovillers Hill 
into this valley and then across it. 

Right at the upper end of this valley, rather 
more than a mile away, yet plainly visible from 
our lines near Ovillers, at the time of the 
beginning of the battle, were a few red-brick 
ruins in an irregular row across the valley-head. 

A clump of small fir and cypress trees stood 
up dark on the hill at the western end of this 
row, and behind the trees was a line of green 
hill topped with the ruins of a windmill. The 
ruins, now gone, were the end of Pozieres 
village, the dark trees grew in Pozieres 
cemetery, and the mill was the famous windmill 
of Pozieres, which marked the crest that was 
one of the prizes of the battle. All these things 
were then clearly to be seen, though in the dis- 
tance. 

The main hollow of the valley is not remark- 
able except that it is crossed by enormous 
trenches and very steeply hedged by a hill on 
its eastern flank. This eastern hill which has 
such a steep side is a spur or finger of chalk 
thrusting southward from Pozieres, like the 
ring-finger of the imagined hand. Mash 
Valley curves round its finger-tip, and just at 



70 The Old Front Line 

the spring of the curve the third of the four 
Albert roads crosses it, and goes up the spur 
towards Pozieres and Bapaume. The line of 
the road, which is rather banked up, so as to be 
a raised way, like so many Roman roads, can be 
plainly seen, going along the spur, almost to 
Pozieres. In many places, it makes the eastern 
skyline to observers down in the valley. 

Behind our front line in this Mash Valley is 
the pleasant green Usna Hill, which runs across 
the hollow and shuts it in to the south. From 
this hill, seamed right across with our reserve 
and support trenches, one can look down at the 
enemy position, which crosses Mash Valley in 
six great lines all very deep, strong, and dug 
into for underground shelter. 

Standing in Mash Valley, at the foot of Ring 
Finger Spur, just where the Roman Road starts 
its long rise to Pozieres, one sees a lesser road 
forking off to the right, towards a village called 
Contalmaison, a couple of miles away. The 
fork of the road marks where our old front 
line ran. The trenches are filled in at this 
point now, so that the roads may be used, but 
the place was once an exceedingly hot corner. 
In the old days, all the space between the two 
roads at the fork was filled with the village or 
hamlet of La Boisselle, which, though a tiny 



The Old Front Line 71 

place, had once a church and perhaps a hundred 
inhabitants. The enemy fortified the village 
till it was an exceedingly strong place. We 
held a part of the village cemetery. Some of 
the broken crosses of the graves still show 
among the chalk here. 

To the left of the Roman Road, only a 
stone's throw from this ruined graveyard, a 
part of our line is built up with now rotting 
sandbags full of chalk, so that it looks like a 
mound of grey rocks. Opposite the mound, 
perhaps a hundred yards up the hill, is another, 
much bigger, irregular mound, of chalk that has 
become dirty, with some relics of battered black 
wire at its base. The space between the two 
mounds is now green with grass, though pitted 
with shell-holes, and marked in many places 
with the crosses of graves. The space is the 
old No Man's Land, and the graves are of men 
who started to charge across that field on the 
1st of July. The big grey mound is the outer 
wall or casting of a mine thirty yards deep in 
the chalk and a hundred yards across, which 
we sprang under the enemy line there on that 
summer morning, just before our men went 
over. 

La Boisselle, after being battered by us in 
our attack, was destroyed by enemy fire after 



72 The Old Front Line 

we had taken it, and then cleared by our men 
who wished to use the roads. It offers no sight 
of any interest; but just outside it, between the 
old lines, there is a stretch of spur, useful for 
observation, for which both sides fought bit- 
terly. For about 200 yards, the No Man's 
Land is a succession of pits in the chalk where 
mines have been sprung. Chalk, wire, stakes, 
friends, and enemies seem here to have been all 
blown to powder. 

The lines cross this debated bit, and go across 
a small, ill-defined bulk of chalk, known as 
Chapes Spur, on the top of which there is a 
vast heap of dazzlingly white chalk, so bright 
that it is painful to look at. Beyond it is the 
pit of a mine, evenly and cleanly blown, thirty- 
five yards deep, and more than a hundred yards 
across, in the pure chalk of the upland, as white 
as cherry blossom. This is the finest, though 
not the biggest, mine in the battlefield. It was 
the work of many months, for the shafts by 
which it was approached began more than a 
quarter of a mile away. It was sprung on 
the 1st of July as a signal for the attack. Quite 
close to it are the graves of an officer and a 
sergeant, both English, who were killed in the 
attack a few minutes after that chasm in the 



The Old Front Line 73 

chalk had opened. The sergeant was killed 
while trying to save his officer. 

The lines bend down south-eastward from 
Chapes Spur, and cross a long, curving, shallow 
valley, known as Sausage Valley, famous, later 
in the battle, as an assembly place for men go- 
ing up against Pozieres. Here the men in our 
line could see nothing but chalk slope to right, 
left, or front, except the last tree of La 
Boisselle, rising gaunt and black above the line 
of the hill. Just behind them, however, at the 
foot of the Sausage Valley they had a pleasant 
wooded hill, the hill of Becourt, which was for 
nearly two years within a mile of the front line, 
yet remained a green and leafy hill, covered 
with living trees, among which the chateau of 
Becourt remained a habitable house. 

The lines slant in a south-easterly direction 
across the Sausage Valley; they mount the spur 
to the east of it, and proceed, in the same direc- 
tion, across a bare field, like the top of a slightly 
tilted table, in the long slope down to Fricourt. 
Here, the men in our front lines could see rather 
more from their position. In front of them 
was a smooth space of grass slightly rising to 
the enemy lines two hundred yards away. Be- 
hind the enemy lines is a grassy space, and 



74 The Old Front Line 

behind this, there shows what seems to be a 
gully or ravine, beyond which the high ground 
of another spur rises, much as the citadel of 
an old encampment rises out of its walled ditch. 
This high ground of this other spur is not more 
than a few feet above the ground near it, but it 
is higher ; it commands it. All the high ground 
is wooded. To the southern or lower end of 
it the trees are occasional and much broken by 
fire. To the northern or upper end they grow 
in a kind of wood though all are much de- 
stroyed. Right up to the wood, all the high 
ground bears traces of building; there are little 
tumbles of bricks and something of the colour 
of brick all over the pilled, poxed, and blasted 
heap that is so like an old citadel. The ravine 
in front of it is the gully between the two spurs; 
it shelters the sunken road to Contalmaison; 
the heap is Fricourt village, and the woodland 
to the north is Fricourt Wood. A glance is 
enough to show that it is a strong position. 

To the left of Fricourt, the spur rises slowly 
into a skyline. To the right the lines droop 
down the spur to a valley, across a brook and a 
road in the valley, and up a big bare humping 
chalk hill placed at right angles to the spur on 
which Fricourt stands. 

The spur on which Fricourt stands and the 



The Old Front Line 75 

spur down which the lines run both end at the 
valley in a steep drop. Just above the steep 
fall our men fought very hard to push back the 
enemy a little towards Fricourt, so that he 
might not see the lower part of the valley, or 
be able to enfilade our lines on the other side 
of it. For about three hundred yards here 
the space between the lines is filled with the 
craters of mines exploded under the enemy's 
front line. In some cases, we seized and held 
the craters; in others the craters were untenable 
by either side. Under one of those held by us 
it was found that the enemy had sunk a big 
counter-mine, which was excavated and ready 
for charging at the time of the beginning of 
the battle, when Fricourt fell. This part of the 
line is more thickly coated with earth than most 
of the chalk hills of the battlefield. The 
craters lie in a blown and dug up wilderness 
of heaps of reddish earth, pocked with shell- 
holes, and tumbled with wire. The enemy lines 
are much broken and ruined, their parapets 
thrown down, the mouths of their dugouts 
blown in, and their pride abased. 

The Fricourt position was one of the boasts 
of the enemy on this front. Other places on 
the line, such as the Leipzig, the Schwaben, and 
the trenches near Hamel, were strong, because 



j6 The Old Front Line 

they could be supported by works behind them 
or on their flanks. Fricourt was strong in it- 
self, like Gommecourt. It was perhaps the 
only place in the field of which it could be said 
that it was as strong as Gommecourt. As at 
Gommecourt, it had a good natural glacis up 
to the front line, which was deep, strong, and 
well wired. Behind the front line was a wired 
second line, and behind that, the rising spur 
on which the village stood, commanding both 
with machine-gun emplacements. 

Fricourt was not captured by storm, but 
swiftly isolated and forced to surrender. It 
held out not quite two days. It was the first 
first-rate fortress taken by our men from the 
enemy in this engagement. In the ruins, they 
saw for the first time the work which the enemy 
puts into his main defences, and the skill and 
craft with which he provides for his comfort. 
For some weeks, the underground arrange- 
ments of Fricourt, the stairs with wired treads, 
the bolting holes, the air and escape shafts, the 
living rooms with electric light, the panelled 
walls, covered with cretonnes of the smartest 
Berlin patterns, the neat bunks and the signs of 
female visitors, were written of in the press, so 
that some may think that Fricourt was better 
fitted than other places on the line. It is not so. 



The Old Front Line 77 

The work at Fricourt was well done, but it was 
no better than that at other places, where a 
village with cellars in it had to be converted 
into a fortress. Our men took Fricourt at the 
beginning of the battle, in a fair state of preser- 
vation. Such work was then new to our men, 
and this good example was made much of. 

In the valley below the village, in great, deep, 
and powerfully revetted works, the enemy had 
built himself gun emplacements, so weighted 
with timber balks that they collapsed soon after 
his men ceased to attend them. The line of 
these great works ran (as so many of his 
important lines have run) at the foot of a steep 
bank or lynchet, so that at a little distance the 
parapet of the work merged into the bank be- 
hind it and was almost invisible. 

This line of guns ran about east and west 
across the neck of the Fricourt Salient, which 
thrust still further south, across the little valley 
and up the hill on the other side. 

Our old line crosses the valley just to the 
east of the Fricourt Station on the little railway 
which once ran in the valley past Fricourt and 
Mametz to Montauban. It then crossed the 
fourth of the roads from Albert, at Fricourt 
cemetery, which is a small, raised forlorn 
garden of broken tombs at cross-roads, under 



78 The Old Front Line 

the hill facing Fricourt. Here our line began 
to go diagonally up the lower slopes of the hill. 
The enemy line climbed it further to the east, 
round the bulging snout of the hill, at a steep 
and difficult point above the bank of a sunken 
road. Towards the top of the hill the lines 
converged. 

All the way of the hill, the enemy had the 
stronger position. It was above us almost in- 
visible and unguessable, except from the air, at 
the top of a steep climb up a clay bank, which in 
wet weather makes bad going even for the 
Somme ; and though the lie of the ground made 
it impossible for him to see much of our posi- 
tion, it was impossible for us to see anything 
or his or to assault him. The hill is a big 
steep chalk hill, with contours so laid upon it 
that not much of it can be seen from below. By 
looking to the left from our trenches on its 
western lower slopes one can see nothing of 
Fricourt, for the bulge of the hill's snout covers 
it. One has a fair view of the old English 
line on the smoothish big slope between Fri- 
court and Becourt, but nothing of the enemy 
stronghold. One might have lived in those 
trenches for nearly two years without seeing 
any enemy except the rain and mud and lice. 

Up at the top of the hill, there is an immense 



The Old Front Line 



79 



prospect over the eastern half of the battlefield, 
and here, where the lines converge, it was most 
necessary for us to have the crest and for the 
enemy to keep us off it. The highest ground 
is well forward, on the snout, and this point 
was the only part of the hill which the enemy 
strove to keep. His line goes up the hill to the 
highest point, cuts off the highest point, and at 
once turns eastward, so that his position on 
the hill is just the northern slope and a narrow 
line of crest. It is as though an army holding 
Fleet Street against an army on the Embank- 
ment and in Cheapside should have seized Lud- 
gate Hill to the top of the steps of St. Paul's and 
left the body of the cathedral to its opponent. 
The lines securing this important salient are of 
immense strength and intricacy, with many 
great avenues of approach. The front line is 
double across the greater part of the crest, and 
behind it is a very deep, strong, trebly wired 
support line which is double at important points. 
Our old front line runs almost straight across 
the crest parallel with the enemy front line, 
and distant from it from forty to one hundred 
and fifty yards. The crest or highest ground 
is on both flanks of the hill-top close to the 
enemy line. Between the lines at both these 
points are the signs of a struggle which raged 



80 The Old Front Line 

for weeks and months for the possession of 
those lumps of hill, each, perhaps, two hundred 
yards long, by fifty broad, by five high. Those 
fifteen feet of height were bartered for with 
more than their own weight of sweat and blood; 
the hill can never lose the marks of the struggle. 
In those two patches of the hill the space 
between the lines is a quarry of confluent 
craters, twenty or thirty yards deep, blown into 
and under each other till the top of the hill is 
split apart. No man can now tell which of 
all these mines were sunk by our men. The 
quarry runs irregularly in heaps and hollows of 
chalk and red earth mingled like flesh and 
blood. On our side of the pits the marks of 
our occupation are plain. There in several 
places, as at La Boisselle and on the Beaucourt 
spur, our men have built up the parapet of 
our old front line by thousands of sandbags 
till it is a hill-top or cairn from which they 
could see beyond. The sandbags have rotted 
and the chalk and flints within have fallen partly 
through the rags, and Nature has already begun 
to change those heaps to her own colours, but 
they will be there for ever as the mark of our 
race. Such monuments must be as lasting as 
Stonehenge. Neither the mines nor the guns 
of the enemy could destroy them. From among 



The Old Front Line 81 

them our soldiers peered through the smoke of 
burning and explosions at the promised land 
which the battle made ours. 

From those heaps there is a wide view over 
that part of the field. To the left one sees 
Albert, the wooded clump of Becourt, and a 
high green spur which hides the Sausage Valley. 
To the front this green spur runs to the higher 
ground from which the Fricourt spur thrusts. 
On this higher ground, behind Fricourt and its 
wood, is a much bigger, thicker, and better 
grown wood, about a mile and a half away; this 
is the wood of Mametz. Some short distance 
to the left of this wood, very plainly visible 
on the high, rather bare hill, is a clump of 
pollarded trees near a few heaps of red brick. 
The trees were once the shade-giving trees 
about the market-place of Contalmaison, a 
hamlet at a cross-roads at this point. Behind 
these ruins the skyline is a kind of ridge which 
runs in a straight line, broken in one place by 
a few shatters of trees. These trees are the 
remains of the wood which once grew outside 
the village of Pozieres. The ridge is the Al- 
bert-Bapaume Road, here passing over the 
highest ground on its path. 

Turning from these distant places and look- 
ing to the right, one sees, just below, twelve 



82 The Old Front Line 

hundred yards to the east of Fricourt, across 
the valley at the foot of this hill of the salient, 
the end of an irregular spur, on which are the 
shattered bricks of the village of Mametz be- 
fore mentioned. 

To the north of Mametz the ground rises. 
From the eyrie of the salient one can look over 
it and away to the north to big rolling chalk 
land, most of it wooded. Mametz Wood is a 
dark expanse to the front; to the right of it 
are other woods, Bazentin Woods, Big and 
Little, and beyond them, rather to the right and 
only just visible as a few sticks upon the sky- 
line, are two other woods, High Wood, like a 
ghost in the distance, and the famous and ter- 
rible Wood of Delville. High Wood is nearly 
five miles away and a little out of the picture. 
The other wooded heights are about three miles 
away. All that line of high ground marked by 
woods was the enemy second line, which with 
a few slight exceptions was our front line be- 
fore the end of the third week of the battle. 

From this hill-top of the salient the lines 
run down the north-eastern snout of the hill 
and back across the valley, so as to shut in 
Mametz. Then they run eastward for a 
couple of miles, up to and across a plateau in 
front of the hamlet of Carnoy, which was just 



The Old Front Line 83 

within our line. From our line, in this bare 
and hideous field, little could be seen but the 
slope up to the enemy line. At one point, 
where the road or lane from Carnoy to Mon- 
tauban crossed the enemy line, there was a 
struggle for the power to see, and as a result 
of the struggle mines and counter-mines were 
sprung here till the space between the lines is 
now a chaos of pits and chasms full of water. 
The country here is an expanse of smoothish 
tilted slopes, big, empty, and lonely, and 
crossed (at about the middle point) by a 
strange narrow gut or gully, up which the rail- 
way once ran to Montauban. No doubt there 
are places in the English chalk counties which 
resemble this sweep of country, but I know of 
none so bare or so featureless. The ground is 
of the reddish earth which makes such bad 
mud. The slopes are big and gradual, either 
up or down. Little breaks the monotony of 
the expanse except a few copses or sites of 
copses; the eye is always turning to the dis- 
tance. 

In front, more than half a mile away, the 
ground reaches its highest point in the ridge or 
bank which marks the road to Montauban. 
The big gradual sweep up is only broken by 
lines of trenches and by mud heaped up from 



84 The Old Front Line 

the road. Some of the trees which once made 
Montauban pleasant and shady still stand over 
the little heaps of brick and solitary iron gate 
which show where the village used to stand. 
Rather to the right of this, and nearer to our 
lines, are some irregular red heaps with girders 
protuding from them. This is the enemy 
fortress of the brickworks of Montauban. 
Beyond this, still further to the right, behind 
the old enemy line, the ground loses its 
monotony and passes into lovely and romantic 
sweeping valleys, which our men could not see 
from their lines. 

Well behind our English lines in this district 
and above the dip where Carnoy stands, the 
fourth of the four roads from Albert runs east- 
ward along a ridge-top between a double row 
of noble trees which have not suffered very 
severely, except at their eastern end. Just 
north of this road, and a little below it on the 
slopes of the ridge, is the village of Maricourt. 
Our line turns to the southeast opposite 
Montauban, and curves in towards the ridge 
so as to run just outside Maricourt, along the 
border of a little wood to the east of the houses. 
From all the high ground to the north of it, 
from the enemy's second line and beyond, the 
place is useful to give a traveller his bearings. 



The Old Front Line 85 

The line of plane-trees along the road on the 
ridge, and the big clumps of trees round the 
village, are landmarks which cannot be mis- 
taken from any part of the field. 

Little is to be seen from our line outside 
Maricourt Wood, except the enemy line a little 
beyond it, and the trees of other woods behind 
it. 

The line turns to the south, parallel with the 
wood, crosses the fourth road (which goes on 
towards Peronne) and goes down some difficult, 
rather lovely, steep chalk slopes, wooded in 
parts, to the ruins of Fargny Mill on the 
Somme River. 

The Somme River is here a very beautiful ex- 
panse of clear chalk water like a long wander- 
ing shallow lake. Through this shallow lake 
the river runs in half a dozen channels, which 
are parted and thwarted in many places by 
marsh, reed-beds, osier plots, and tracts of 
swampy woodland. There is nothing quite like 
it in England. The river-bed is pretty gen- 
erally between five and six hundred yards 
across. 

Nearly two miles above the place where the 
old enemy line comes down to the bank, the 
river thrusts suddenly north-westward, in a very 
noble great horse-shoe, the bend of which comes 



86 The Old Front Line 

at Fargny where our lines touched it. The 
enemy line touched the horse-shoe close to our 
own at a curious wooded bank or slope, known 
(from its shape on the map, which is like a 
cocked hat) as the Chapeau de Gendarme. 
Just behind our lines, at the bend, the horse- 
shoe sweeps round to the south. The river-bed 
at once broadens to about two-thirds of a mile, 
and the river, in four or five main channels, 
passes under a most beautiful sweep of steep 
chalk cliff, not unlike some of the chalk country 
near Arundel. These places marked the end of 
the British sector at the time of the beginning 
of the battle. On the south or left bank of 
the Somme River the ground was held by the 
French. 

Such was our old front line at the beginning 
of the battle, and so the travellers of our race 
will strive to picture it when they see the ground 
under the crops of coming Julys. It was never 
anything but a makeshift, patched together, 
and held, God knows how, against greater 
strength. Our strongest places were the half- 
dozen built-up observation posts at the mines 
near Fricourt, Serre, and La Boisselle. For 
the rest, our greatest strength was but a couple 
of sandbags deep. There was no concrete in 



The Old Front Line 87 

any part of the line, very few iron girders and 
not many iron " humpies " or " elephant 
backs " to make the roofs of dugouts. The 
whole line gives the traveller the impression 
that it was improvised (as it was) by amateurs 
with few tools, and few resources, as best they 
could, in a time of need and danger. Like the 
old, hurriedly built Long Walls at Athens, it 
sufficed, and like the old camps of Caesar it 
served, till our men could take the much finer 
lines of the enemy. A few words may be said 
about those enemy lines. They were very dif- 
ferent lines from ours. 

The defences of the enemy front line varied 
a little in degree, but hardly at all in kind, 
throughout the battlefield. The enemy wire 
was always deep, thick, and securely staked with 
iron supports, which were either crossed like the 
letter X, or upright, with loops to take the 
wire and shaped at one end like corkscrews 
so as to screw into the ground. The wire 
stood on these supports on a thick web, about 
four feet high and from thirty to forty feet 
across. The wire used was generally as thick 
as sailor's marline stuff, or two twisted rope- 
yarns. It contained, as a rule, some sixteen 
barbs to the foot. The wire used in front of 
our lines was generally galvanized, and re- 



88 The Old Front Line 

mained grey after months of exposure. The 
enemy wire, not being galvanized, rusted to a 
black colour, and shows up black at a great 
distance. In places this web or barrier was 
supplemented with trip-wire, or wire placed 
just above the ground, so that the artillery ob- 
serving officers might not see it and so not cause 
it to be destroyed. This trip-wire was as diffi- 
cult to cross as the wire of the entanglements. 
In one place (near the Y Ravine at Beaumont 
Hamel) this trip-wire was used with thin iron 
spikes a yard long of the kind known as cal- 
throps. The spikes were so placed in the 
ground that about one foot of spike projected. 
The scheme was that our men should catch their 
feet in the trip-wire, fall on the spikes, and be 
transfixed. 

In places, in front of the front line in the 
midst of his wire, sometimes even in front of 
the wire, the enemy had carefully hidden snipers 
and machine-gun posts. Sometimes these out- 
side posts were connected with his front-line 
trench by tunnels, sometimes they were simply 
shell-holes, slightly altered with a spade to take 
the snipers and the gunners. These outside 
snipers had some success in the early parts of 
the battle. They caused losses among our men 
by firing in the midst of them and by shoot- 



The Old Front Line 89 

ing them in the backs after they had passed. 
Usually the posts were small oblong pans in 
the mud, in which the men lay. Sometimes 
they were deep narrow graves in which the 
men stood to fire through a funnel in the earth. 
Here and there, where the ground was favour- 
able, especially when there was some little knop, 
hillock, or bulge of ground just outside their 
line, as near Gommecourt Park and close to 
the Sunken Road at Beaumont Hamel, he 
placed several such posts together. Outside 
Gommecourt, a slight lynchet near the enemy 
line was prepared for at least a dozen such posts 
invisible from any part of our line and not easily 
to be picked out by photograph, and so placed 
as to sweep at least a mile of No Man's Land. 
When these places had been passed, and the 
enemy wire, more or less cut by our shrapnel, 
had been crossed, our men had to attack the 
enemy fire trenches of the first line. These, 
like the other defences, varied in degree, but not 
in kind. They were, in the main, deep, solid 
trenches, dug with short bays or zigzags in the 
pattern of the Greek Key or badger's earth. 
They were seldom less than eight feet and some- 
times as much as twelve feet deep. Their sides 
were revetted, or held from collapsing, by 
strong wickerwork. They had good, comfort- 



90 The Old Front Line 

able standing slabs or banquettes on which the 
men could stand to lire. As a rule, the parapets 
were not built up with sandbags as ours were. 

In some parts of the line, the front trenches 
were strengthened at intervals of about fifty 
yards by finy forts or fortlets made of concrete 
and so built into the parapet that they could 
not be seen from without, even five yards away. 
These fortlets were pierced with a foot-long 
slip for the muzzle of a machine gun, and were 
just big enough to hold the gun and one gunner. 

In the forward wall of the trenches were the 
openings of the shafts which led to the front- 
line dugouts. The shafts are all of the same 
pattern. They have open mouths about four 
feet high, and slant down into the earth for 
about twenty feet at an angle of forty-five de- 
grees. At the bottom of the stairs which led 
down are the living rooms and barracks which 
communicate with each other so that if a shaft 
collapse the men below may still escape by an- 
other. The shafts and living rooms are 
strongly propped and panelled with wood, and 
this has led to the destruction of most of the 
few which survived our bombardment. While 
they were needed as billets our men lived in 
them. Then the wood was removed, and the 
dugout and shaft collapsed. 



The Old' Front Line 91 

During the bombardment before an attack, 
the enemy kept below in his dugouts. If one 
shaft were blown in by a shell, they passed to 
the next. When the fire " lifted " to let the at- 
tack begin, they raced up the stairs with their 
machine guns and had them in action within a 
minute. Sometimes the fire was too heavy for 
this, for trench, parapet, shafts, dugouts, wood, 
and fortlets, were pounded out of existence, so 
that no man could say that a line had ever run 
there; and in these cases the garrison was de- 
stroyed in the shelters. This happened in 
several places, though all the enemy dugouts 
were kept equipped with pioneer tools by which 
buried men could dig themselves out. 

The direction of the front-line trenches was 
so inclined with bends, juts, and angles as to 
give flanking fire upon attackers. 

At some little distance behind the front line 
(a hundred yards or so) was a second fire line, 
wired like the first, though less elaborate and 
generally without concrete fortlets. This 
second line was usually as well sited for fire as 
the front line. There were many communica- 
tion trenches between the two lines. Half a 
mile behind the second line was a third support 
line; and behind this, running along the whole 
front, a mile or more away, was the prepared 



92 The Old Front Line 

second main position, which was in every way 
like the front line, with wire, concrete fortlets, 
dugouts, and a difficult glacis for the attacker 
to climb. 

The enemy batteries were generally placed 
behind banks or lynchets which gave good 
natural cover; but in many places he mounted 
guns in strong permanent emplacements, built 
up of timber balks, within a couple of miles (at 
Fricourt within a quarter of a mile) of his 
front line. In woods from the high trees of 
which he could have clear observation, as in 
the Bazentin, Bernafay, and Trones Woods, he 
had several of these emplacements, and also 
stout concrete fortlets for heavy single guns. 

All the enemy position on the battlefield was 
well gunned at the time of the beginning of the 
battle. In modern war, it is not possible to 
hide preparations for an attack on a wide front. 
Men have to be brought up, trenches have to 
be dug, the artillery has to prepare, and men, 
guns, and trenches have to be supplied with 
food, water, shells, sandbags, props, and re- 
vetments. When the fire on any sector in- 
creases tenfold, while the roads behind the lines 
are thronged with five times the normal traffic 
of troops and lorries, and new trenches, the 
attack or " jumping-off " trenches, are being 



The Old Front Line 93 

dug in front of the line, a commander cannot 
fail to know that an attack is preparing. 
These preparations must be made and cannot 
be concealed from observers in the air or on the 
ground. The enemy knew very well that we 
were about to attack upon the Somme front, 
but did not know at which point to expect the 
main thrust. To be ready, in any case, he 
concentrated guns along the sector. It seems 
likely that he expected our attack to be an at- 
tempt to turn Bapaume by a thrust from the 
west, by Gommecourt, Puisieux, Grandcourt. 
In all this difficult sector his observations and 
arrangements for cross-fire were excellent. ^ He 
concentrated a great artillery here (it is a 
legend among our men that he brought up a 
hundred batteries to defend Gommecourt 
alone). In this sector, and in one other place 
a little to the south of it, his barrage upon our 
trenches, before the battle, was very accurate, 
terrible, and deadly. 

Our attacks were met by a profuse machine- 
gun fire from the trench parapets and from the 
hidden pits between and outside the lines. 
There was not very much rifle fire in any part of 
the battle, but all the hotly fought for strong- 
holds were defended by machine guns to the 
last. It was reported that the bodies of some 



94 The Old Front Line 

enemy soldiers were found chained to their 
guns, and that on the bodies of others were 
intoxicating pills, designed to madden and in- 
furiate the takers before an attack. The fight- 
ing in the trenches was mainly done by bombing 
with hand-grenades, of which the enemy had 
several patterns, all effective. His most used 
type was a grey tin cylinder, holding about a 
pound of explosive, and screwed to a wooden 
baton or handle about a foot long for the 
greater convenience of throwing. 

Early in the spring of 19 16, it was deter- 
mined that an attack should be made by our 
armies upon these lines of the enemy, so as to 
bring about a removal of the enemy guns and 
men, then attacking the French at Verdun and 
the Russians on the eastern front. 

Preparations for this attack were made 
throughout the first half of the year. New 
roads were cut, old roads were remetalled, new 
lines of railways were surveyed and laid, and 
supplies and munitions were accumulated not 
far from the front. Pumping stations were 
built and wells were sunk for the supply of 
water to the troops during the battle. Fresh 
divisions were brought up and held ready be- 
hind the line. An effort was made to check the 




o 
PQ 



at 



13 



h 



The Old Front Line 95 

enemy's use of aeroplanes. In June, our Air 
Service in the Somme sector made it so difficult 
for the enemy to take photographs over our 
lines that his knowledge of our doings along 
the front of the planned battle was lessened and 
thwarted. At the same time, many raids were 
made by our aeroplanes upon the enemy's 
depots and magazines behind his front. 
Throughout June, our infantry raided the 
enemy line in many places to the north of the 
planned battle. It seems possible that these 
raids led him to think that our coming attack 
would be made wholly to the north of the 
Ancre River. 

During the latter half of June, our armies 
concentrated a very great number of guns be- 
hind the front of the battle. The guns were of 
every kind, from the field gun to the heaviest 
howitzer. Together they made what was at 
that time by far the most terrible concentration 
of artillery ever known upon a battlefield. 
Vast stores of shells of every known kind were 
made ready, and hourly increased. 

As the guns came into battery, they opened 
intermittent fire, so that, by the 20th of June, 
the fire along our front was heavier than it had 
been before. At the same time, the fire of the 
machine guns and trench mortars in our 



g6 The Old Front Line 

trenches became hotter and more constant. 
On the 24th of June this fire was increased, by 
system, along the front designed for the bat- 
tle, and along the French front to the south of 
the Somme, until it reached the intensity of a fire 
of preparation. Knowing, as they did, that an 
attack was to come, the enemy made ready and 
kept on the alert. Throughout the front, they 
expected the attack for the next morning. 

The fire was maintained throughout the night, 
but no attack was made in the morning, except 
by aeroplanes. These raided the enemy obser- 
vation balloons, destroyed nine of them, and 
made it impossible for the others to keep in the 
air. The shelling continued all that day, search- 
ing the line and particular spots with intense fire 
and much asphyxiating gas. Again the enemy 
prepared for an attack in the morning, and 
again there was no attack, although the fire of 
preparation still went on. The enemy said, 
" To-morrow will make three whole days of 
preparation; the English will attack to-mor- 
row." But when the morning came, there was 
no attack, only the never-ceasing shelling, which 
seemed to increase as time passed. It was now 
difficult and dangerous to move within the enemy 
lines. Relieving exhausted soldiers, carrying 
out the wounded, and bringing up food and 



The Old Front Line 97 

water to the front, became terrible feats of war. 
The fire continued and increased, all that day 
and all the next day, and the day after that. It 
darkened the days with smoke and lit the nights 
with flashes. It covered the summer landscape 
with a kind of haze of hell, earth-coloured 
above fields and reddish above villages, from 
the dust of blown mud and brick flung up into 
the air. The tumult of these days and nights 
cannot be described nor imagined. The air 
was without wind yet it seemed in a hurry with 
the passing of death. Men knew not which 
they heard, a roaring that was behind and in 
front, like a presence, or a screaming that never 
ceased to shriek in the air. No thunder was 
ever so terrible as that tumult. It broke the 
drums of the ears when it came singly, but when 
it rose up along the front and gave tongue to- 
gether in full cry it humbled the soul. With 
the roaring, crashing, and shrieking came a 
racket of hammers from the machine guns till 
men were dizzy and sick from the noise, which 
thrust between skull and brain, and beat out 
thought. With the noise came also a terror 
and an exultation, that one should hurry, and 
hurry, and hurry, like the shrieking shells, into 
the pits of fire opening on the hills. Every 
night in all this week the enemy said, " The 



98 The Old Front Line 

English will attack to-morrow," and in the front 
lines prayed that the attack might come, that so 
an end, any end, might come to the shelling. 

It was fine, cloudless, summer weather, not 
very clear, for there was a good deal of heat 
haze and of mist in the nights and early morn- 
ings. It was hot yet brisk during the days. 
The roads were thick in dust. Clouds and 
streamers of chalk dust floated and rolled over 
all the roads leading to the front, till men and 
beasts were grey with it. 

At half-past six in the morning of the 1st of 
July all the guns on our front quickened their 
fire to a pitch of intensity never before attained. 
Intermittent darkness and flashing so played on 
the enemy line from Gommecourt to Maricourt 
that it looked like a reef on a loppy day. For 
one instant it could be seen as a white rim above 
the wire, then some comber of a big shell struck 
it fair and spouted it black aloft. Then an- 
other and another fell, and others of a new kind 
came and made a different darkness, through 
which now and then some fat white wreathing 
devil of explosion came out and danced. Then 
it would show out, with gaps in it, and with 
some of it level with the field, till another 
comber would fall and go up like a breaker and 
smash it out of sight again. Over all the vil- 



The Old Front Line 99 

lages on the field there floated a kind of bloody 
dust from the blasted bricks. 

In our trenches after seven o'clock on that 
morning, our men waited under a heavy fire for 
the signal to attack. Just before half-past 
seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up 
with a roar that shook the earth and brought 
down the parapets in our lines. Before the 
blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen 
the hand of Time rested on the half-hour mark, 
and along all that old front line of the English 
there came a whistling and a crying. The men 
of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in 
tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, 
and having done with all pleasant things, ad- 
vanced across the No Man's Land to begin the 
Battle of the Somme. 



THE END 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



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of Macmillan books by the same author 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Lost Endeavour 

$1-50 
Another of John Masefield's earlier works is now reprinted. " Lost 
Endeavour" is a stirring story of adventure, dealing with pirates and 
buccaneers, and life on the seas in a day when an ocean trip was beset 
with all kinds of dangers and excitements. Those who have enjoyed 
"Captain Margaret" and " Multitude and Solitude" will find this tale 
equally exhilarating. 

Gallipoli 

"This is a miniature epic, or saga, its eloquent but unforced 
prose making it a book that will stand high among Masefield's 
productions. . . Masefield writes of the military aspect of the 
campaign with a rare facility for pictorial expression ... a 
splendid story of bravery splendidly told."— New York Evening 
Post. 

Multitude and Solitude 

$i-35 

"This is material of the best kind for a story of adventure, and 

Mr. Masefield uses it to the best advantage. He has the gift of 

direct and simple narrative, and it need hardly be said that he 

knows the human heart." — Argonaut. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Faithful : A Tragedy in Three Acts 

Cloth, $1.25. Leather, $1*75 

Mr. Masefield's contributions to dramatic literature are held 
in quite as high esteem by his admirers as his narrative poems. In 
"The Faithful," his new play, he is at his best. 

"A striking drama ... a notable work that will meet with the 
hearty appreciation of discerning readers." — The Nation. 

Philip the King, and Other Poems 

Cloth, i2mo, $1.25. Leather, $1.75 

"Mr. Masefield's new poetical drama is a piece of work such as 
only the author of 'Nan' and 'The Tragedy of Pompey' could 
have written, tense in situation and impressive in its poetry. . . . 
In addition to this important play, the volume contains some new 
and powerful narrative poems of the sea — the men who live on it 
and their ships. There are also some shorter lyrics as well as an 
impressive poem on the present war in Europe which expresses, 
perhaps, better than anything yet written, the true spirit of Eng- 
land in the present struggle." 

"Mr. Masefield has never done anything better than these 
poems." — Argonaut. 

"The compelling strength of John Masefield's genius is revealed 
in the memorable poem, 'August, 19 14,' published in his latest 
volume of poetry." — Review of Reviews. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Story of a Round-House, 
and Other Poems 

By JOHN MASEFIELD 

New and revised edition, $i.jo. Leather, $1.75 

" The story of that rounding of the Horn S Never in prose has the sea been so tremen- 
dously described." — Chicago Evening Post. 

" A remarkable poem of the sea." — San Francisco Chronicle. 

"Vivid and thrillingly realistic." — Current Literature. 

"A genuine sailor and a genuine poet are a rare combination; they have produced a 
rare poem of the sea, which has made Mr. Masefield's position in literature secure beyond 
the reach of caviling." — Everybody 's Magazine. 

" Masefield has prisoned in verse the spirit of life at sea." — N. Y. Sun, 



The Everlasting Mercy and 
The Widow in the Bye Street 

(Awarded the Royal Society of Literature's prize of $500) 

New and revised edition, $1,25. Leather, $1*75 

" Mr. Masefield comes like a flash of light across contemporary English poetry. The 
improbable has been accomplished; he has made poetry out of the very material that has 
refused to yield it for almost a score of years." — Boston Evening Transcript. 

" Originality, force, distinction, and deep knowledge of the human heart." — Chicago 
Record-He ra Id. 

" They are truly great pieces." — Kentucky Post. 

" A vigor and sincerity rare in modern English literature." — The Independent. 

" John Masefield is the man of the hour, and the man of to-morrow too, in poetry and 
in the play writing craft." — John Galsworthy. 

" — recreates a wholly new drama of existence." — William Stanley Braithwaite, 
N. Y. Times. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

The Daffodil Fields 

Cloth, i2mo, $z.2$. Leather, $1.60 

"Neither in the design nor in the telling did or could ' Enoch 
Arden' come near the artistic truth of 'The Daffodil Fields.'" — 
Sir Quitter-Couch, Cambridge University. 

A Mainsail Haul 

Cloth, i2tno, $i.2j. Leather, $1.60 

As a sailor before the mast Masefield has traveled the world over. 
Many of the tales in this volume are his own experiences written 
with the same dramatic fidelity displayed in " Dauber." 

The Tragedy of Pompey 

Cloth, i2tno, $1.23. Leather, $1.60 

A play such as only the author of "Nan" could have written. 
Tense in situation and impressive in its poetry it conveys Mase- 
field's genius in the handling of the dramatic form. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

Captain Margaret 



Cloth, $1.50 



Captain Margaret, owner of the Broken Heart, mild dreamer and 
hardy adventurer in one, is a type of character one does not 
often meet in fiction, and his troubled pursuit of the vision he is 
always seeing, in Mr. Masefield's telling, is a story such as we 
seldom hear. From England to Virginia and the Spanish Main 
with men at arms between decks goes the Broken Heart following 
her master's dream, and her thrilling voyage with its storms and 
battles is strongly and stirringly told. When John Masefield 
writes of the sea, the sea lives. 

"Worthy to rank high among books of its class. The story 
has quality, charm, and spirited narrative." — Outlook. 



The Locked Chest, and the 
Sweeps of Ninety-Eight 



p.z$ 



The place of Mr. Masefield as a dramatist has been amply 
proved by the plays which he has published hitherto — '"The 
Faithful," "Philip the King," " The Tragedy of Pompey," among 
others. In the realm of the one-act play he is seen to quite as 
good effect as in the longer work. This volume, the first new 
book from Masefield since his American tour, ranks with his best. 



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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Salt Water Poems and Ballads. 

Twelve full-page illustrations in color, and twenty in black and white. 
By Charles Pears. Price, $2.00 

A book of permanent value by the foremost living poet, illus- 
trated in colors by a widely known artist, selling at a reasonable 
price. 

"The salt of the sea is in these jingles; not the mystic sea of the 
older poets who had an art, but the hard sea that men fight, even 
in these days of leviathan liners, in stout-timbered hulls with 
blocks to rattle and hemp for the gale to whistle through and give 
the salt-lipped chantey man his rugged meters." — New York Sun. 

"His verse has the accent of old chanties, the rudeness and the 
mysticism, simple and matter-of-fact, of the deep-sea mariner." — 
New York Times. 

"They have the roar and dash and swing of crashing breakers, 
the sharp tang of the salt sea air, and at times they creak and 
strain like a stout clipper ship in the roaring forties." — Philadel- 
phia North American. 

"They have the tang of salt spray, and the blue light of corpse 
candles. Wassail and song echo through the lines, and the spirit of 
youth that finds interest and excitement in bad and good alike. 
Their lyric quality is true. Reckless and daring they are in spirit." 
— Baltimore Sun. 



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_«.*« n " iQli 



